As software engineers we don’t just crank out code—in fact these days you could argue that’s what the LLMs are for. We need to deliver code that works—and we need to include proof that it works as well. Not doing that directly shifts the burden of the actual work to whoever is expected to review our code.
Simon defends that engineers should provide evidence of things working when pushing PRs onto other projects. I recently had random students from other countries pushing PRs onto my repos. However, I spent too much time reviewing and making sure it worked. I 100% agree with Simon on this, but I feel the blog post is a bit pessimistic in the sense that software engineers might only be verifiers of correctness.
Don’t be tempted to skip the manual test because you think the automated test has you covered already! Almost every time I’ve done this myself I’ve quickly regretted it.
This is my experience for user-facing software. But these days, I spend little time writing user-facing code other than compiler flags.