AI Coding Tools
Can Claude or Codex write production-ready code?
Short answer
They write good code quickly, but production readiness comes from review, tests and architecture — none of which the tool owns. Used well, AI assistants make an experienced engineer meaningfully faster. Used as a replacement for one, they produce software nobody understands well enough to maintain or debug.
We use AI coding assistants daily. They are genuinely good at the parts of programming that are well-trodden: boilerplate, tests, migrations, refactors with a clear shape, unfamiliar API surfaces.
What they do not do is decide what should exist. Architecture, data modelling, deciding which requirement is actually wrong — that is the expensive part of software, and it is still human work.
The failure mode we see in inherited codebases is accumulated AI output nobody reviewed: it runs, it looks plausible, and no one on the team can explain why it does what it does. That is fine until the first production incident.
Our rule is simple: a senior engineer owns and reviews every line that ships, regardless of who or what typed it first.
// last reviewed September 7, 2026
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