No good engineer will ever tell you that reading your own code is useless, and claiming otherwise is itself a reliable signal of poor engineering judgment.
Quoting Sentry's David Cramer, Scott says any engineer who dismisses reading code as pointless is revealing a red flag about their own engineering discipline. ✦ AI generated
David Cramer · Syntax · 2026-07-06 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 6:33
No good engineer will tell you it's useless to read the code. By the way, that's the easiest signal. I think like it's part of our jobs like we have to care. I think like if you're too lost in the sauce if you just think that just prompt prompt prompt prompt prompt.
verbatim transcript · starts at 6:33
6:33to read the code. By the way, that's the easiest signal." I I think like it's part of our jobs like we have to care. I I think like if you're too lost in the sauce if you just think that just prompt prompt prompt prompt prompt because that also gets into like you're not necessarily caring about token usage or bill or efficiency or moving too fast and these are all
6:53things that we actually need to care about in real production code. So >> yeah. >> Yeah. I Kramer is always dead on um in my experience and it's so funny the people the people that respond to him and like he like doesn't know what he's talking about like >> bro uh yeah Kramer is like one he's a cracked engineer but he's also built something insanely large so it's like
7:20>> yeah [laughter] he runs a a I mean he he's built this business into a billion dollar company. Like that's crazy to me. So >> yeah, >> if you don't know like Kramer is one of the co-founders, former CTO, former COO of >> of uh Century who who we work for as well. >> Um >> yes, I'm not just big uping my boss either. I'll just say that. [laughter]
7:42No, >> no. I And you could see it from the proof. Like I mean we we have a little more in insight into this because we can see all his messages in Slack and like we hear him from all hands. But like >> this guy he still is even though he's not a engineer or CTO anymore. He's still writing code. He's still using agents. He's still working on workflows.
8:02He's he knows what matters. So >> man built a bunch of stuff that I'm using right now. Whether that's the Dex thing uh for >> I use Dex every day. Yeah. >> Yeah. for my my issue tracking and stuff. Uh we also had David Fowler says, "I see a lot of influencers talking about reading the code and building software factories, but I don't see much discourse about what software
8:24engineering teams of the future will look like. Software is a multiplayer game as much as everyone will try to convince you that all you need is a team of agents." Yes, I I so much agree. Uh David nailed this and I think uh there are some people who are working on this problem. Back when we were at JS Nation, there was a panel that I was a part of