korrents

What Charity Majors thinks about code generation

@charity-majors · 50 positions · 1 change of mind

Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab. Co-author of "Database Reliability Engineering" and "Observability Engineering". Writes at charity.wtf about on-call, hierarchy, hiring and the engineer/manager pendulum.

Everything they publish, on ppll ↗

Charity Majors did not write this page.

We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.

3 dated positions, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Charity Majors has said — not written or endorsed by them.

3 positions so far — this page is not yet offered to search engines.

  1. Our readingYou can now generate ten thousand variants of a function faster than you could write it once, and that economics pushes software towards replacement rather than repair.

    Their wordsI mean, if you if you think about it, you could generate 10,000 variants of a function faster than you could write it once.

    ↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 5th of 26 in this recording

  3. Our readingLines of code are the wrong artifact to review; what we should be storing and reviewing is an architecture that generates the code to spec.

    Their wordsLike that just does not seem like the ideal artifact. We should be able to store them somewhere. We should be able to have architecture diagrams that we can review and discuss that generate that code to spec.

    ↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 6th of 26 in this recording

  5. Our readingIf you are not going to read the generated code, what you need is conformance testing: proof that it performs within the boundaries of the code it replaced.

    Their wordsOkay, if I'm not going to read this code, how do I know it's going to perform within boundaries of the last code that I generated? That is conformance testing.

    ↗Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majorsyoutube.com 11th of 26 in this recording