More arrives than I can read
There is a part of this work that never got faster, and I am it.
Every change that goes onto a machine gets read by somebody first. For most of my working life that somebody has been me. The diff, the log, the one line that moved, the reason it moved. It took as long as it took, and the taking of that time was the job.
What arrives now is written faster than I can check it. Something that would have taken an afternoon to type comes back in the time it takes to make a cup of tea, and it is usually right, which is the awkward part. Usually right is a different thing from right, and the only way to tell which one I am holding is to read the whole of it, at my own speed, in order.
So there is a gap between how quickly the work is produced and how quickly it can be understood, and I live inside that gap. I have read less of a change than I should have, and I knew I was doing it at the time. A look is not a check. Skimming something generated is the easiest mistake in this trade now, because it comes out tidy and confident and there is no spelling mistake in it to give the game away.
None of that lands on me today. It lands on a box somewhere, at an hour I would rather be asleep, on a line I skimmed, in code that nobody sat and wrote. I have been the one who gets that call often enough to have a healthy respect for it.
I am not pointing at anybody from here, because I do it too. Some of what goes out under my name was drafted by a tool, and it gets the same treatment as a change: if I cannot read the whole of it properly, my name does not go on it.
So I stay the slow part of my own process, on purpose. I read the diff before it goes near anything, in order, at the speed I actually read at. When I cannot explain a section out loud to myself, it comes out and I write the small version by hand and keep that instead. Nobody has ever asked me to be quick about it. It is the part of the job that is still mine the way it always was, and I would rather be the bottleneck than the man who signed it off.