Trusting the Diff

Phase one is complete. Seven commits, and it stopped at the checkpoint like I asked. I was half expecting it to plow through the whole plan, so this is a good sign. Opus can follow a rule.

Now the part I promised myself: review every commit. I pull up the diffs one at a time. Build files, wiring, a lot of unplumbing. It is doing exactly what I asked, small steps, a little on the slow side. And as I scroll through, a thought I did not want to have shows up anyway.

I do not know what I am looking at.

This is VS Code. Ten years of work by a very large team. I can read the diff, but I cannot tell you whether removing this import breaks something three directories over. The review is theater. I am nodding at code the way you nod at a mechanic.

So the question some of you are already asking is fair: then why do it this way? Is this where we are as an industry now, where I sit here and say "go ahead, Claude, do the thing" and hope nothing explodes? Or do I have to go read and understand all of VS Code before I touch it?

If this were an enterprise app my company owned and I was taking over the reins, yes, of course I would do the slow version. But I would also have a team, and I would divvy this up, because it is way too much for one person. The VS Code team is huge. I am just a dude with a fork.

I have been accused of being too trusting, and I have not been burned yet. That is not a reason to keep trusting. It is a question: why not? My habit when things are going well is to try to break them. The one thing I would actually worry about here is Claude adding something, some sneaky bit of code that compromises the fork later. But I am only removing things right now. Nothing is being added. That changes the risk math.

So I am going to revert this branch and YOLO the whole thing. Going slow is not buying me anything I can use.