Write-Only Code | Heavybit
March 11, 2026
Six months ago, if you had asked me how much production code would eventually be written by AI, I would have claimed a large percentage. LLMs are clearly a massive productivity boost for software developers, and the value of humans manually translating intent into lines of code is rapidly depreciating. I also believed, and still do, that humans whose primary job is to build and operate enterprise software are not going anywhere, even as their day-to-day work is fundamentally redefined by this newest abstraction.
What I underestimated was how little of that future work would involve reading code at all.
I am now convinced that for better and worse we are barreling toward a future where a large and growing fraction of production code is never read by a human. Not skimmed. Not reviewed. Not tweaked. I have taken to calling this Write-Only Code (shout-out to Waldemar Hummer of LocalStack for helping coin the term) and have been spending a lot of time thinking through what it means for us as an industry.
This is a few weeks old now. It seems almost like ancient history. But it’s one of the first things I’ve read which started to articulate the idea that increasingly software engineers may not be even reading the code that we are responsible for.
