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Original: Simon Willison · 22/08/2026

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Summary

The article discusses the importance of effectively instructing and verifying coding agents, emphasizing that line-by-line code review is not always the best validation method.

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Key Insights

“The key skill required to make productive use of coding agents is being able to confidently instruct them on how to make changes.” — Introduction to the article’s main theme.
“Eyeballing every line of code has never been the most effective way to validate a chance to a piece of software.” — Discussion on the limitations of traditional code review methods.

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Topics

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Full Article

22nd August 2026 The key skill required to make productive use of coding agents is being able to confidently instruct them on how to make changes and then confidently verify that those changes have been applied in the correct way. Sometimes this involves reviewing every line of code they have written, but there are other ways to achieve that goal. Eyeballing every line of code has never been the most effective way to validate a chance to a piece of software. Posted 22nd August 2026 at 3:56 pm Recent articles Conceptual integrity and counting lines of code - 19th August 2026 Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things - 16th August 2026 Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face - 7th August 2026 This is a note by Simon Willison, posted on 22nd August 2026. code-review 15 ai 2,199 generative-ai 1,948 llms 1,915 coding-agents 240 agentic-engineering 59 Monthly briefing Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month’s most important LLM developments. Pay me to send you less! Sponsor & subscribe

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Originally published at https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/22/more-than-just-code-review/.