AI may be killing my attention to detail

I remember a time when developing things for Gutenberg or Core was scary. Everything you reviewed, wrote, or introduced was done with great care, with an eye on not breaking anything.

The result of all this has been slow development, and processes and bureaucracy that have kept the project from moving as fast as some hoped (well, a UI for custom post types just landed in Gutenberg 23.1, only took 15 years).

But now, with AI, a couple of prompts and a coffee later, it spits out 1000 lines of code without breaking a sweat, with a self-confidence, pride, tests, and documentation I wish I had myself.

And then, sure, go ahead and review all that, step by step, understanding every line. Of course you don’t, you ask another AI to review it for you.

Then the product doesn’t work, or you find out it slipped in a thousand phpcs:ignore to bypass a few security or code quality rules, or it decides to put a terminal on your landing page in three columns where you can’t read a thing. Or it writes you a “One line to install it” header when your tool actually needs two.

I still remember how, with the Interactivity API, I went line by line, debugger on, figuring out what to do, how to optimize it, how not to mess it up, trying to anticipate every case developers might run into down the line.

I don’t know, every day it gets harder to focus on my work. I have to resist firing up Codex or Claude full blast and only half-reviewing what comes out, but it’s what my body asks for. I don’t notice a huge productivity boost either, but I do notice it in the number of lines of code. I still remember when we used to say that the code with no bugs and the best performance was simply the code that never got written. Now we have thousands of people summoning thousands of agents to create thousands of lines of code and text that nobody is going to actually review (there’s a 1 million line PR out there rewriting Bun in Rust… I mean, if reviewing more than 200 lines is already a pain).

This post was written without AI, hence the lack of structure. The translation into English, though, was done with it.