Understanding is the new bottleneck
Agents can write code faster than we can absorb it. Here's why it still matters for humans to understand what they build — and some techniques for doing that efficiently: explainer docs, quizzes, micro-worlds, and shared spaces.
July 2026 Understanding is the new bottleneck This is a written version of a talk I gave at the AI Engineer conference in July 2026, also shared as a tweet thread. Hot take: I think it's still important to understand the code that our agents write! In this talk I'll explain why that's the case, and show some ideas for how to efficiently understand code. Alright, let's dive in. Agents are writing more and more code for us, and we all know it's getting harder to keep up. But the good news is: there are many ways to understand code! Reading diffs line by line is not the only way. Most of this tal
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