{"slug": "vetted-ai-code-is-hard-to-justify", "title": "Vetted AI code is hard to justify", "summary": "A developer reports that using a frontier coding agent to build a large optimization for his game took several days of planning, a week to review the massive diff, and another week to refactor, leaving him burned out, whereas building it unassisted would have taken about a month but with slower burnout. The developer, who reviewed and approved every line, now questions the justification for vetted AI-generated code.", "body_md": "# Vetted AI code is hard to justify\n\nI have been reflecting on [a large optimization I built for my game](https://x.com/GetLostTheGame/status/2087864598804525248) with the assistance of a frontier coding agent. This optimization took me several days to plan with the agent, about a week to comprehend the massive diff it produced (I review and approve every line), and another week to refactor and refine it until completion.\n\nBy the end, I understood everything that had been built—as if I had written it myself—but **I was burned out.** Untangling and comprehending large amounts of clever, high performance code and deciding if it makes sense within each stratum of abstraction is taxing on the mind.\n\nIf I had built it entirely unassisted, I suspect it would have taken me about a month. It would have been difficult, but I would have paid the comprehension costs as I developed it, in manageable chunks, and burned out much more slowly.\n\nI asked Claude make me an interactive visualization for how I perceive these relationships of coding, comprehension, and burnout:", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/vetted-ai-code-is-hard-to-justify", "canonical_source": "https://amoffat.github.io/blog/vetting-burnout.html", "published_at": "2026-08-17 11:11:39+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-17 11:41:33.001826+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "developer-tools", "ai-agents"], "entities": ["Claude", "GetLostTheGame"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/vetted-ai-code-is-hard-to-justify", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/vetted-ai-code-is-hard-to-justify.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/vetted-ai-code-is-hard-to-justify.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/vetted-ai-code-is-hard-to-justify.jsonld"}}