This all reminds me of the differing experiences people had outsourcing coding in the 2010s when it was still called oDesk. You don’t need to read code, you just need to know that the code works. If something doesn’t show up as a problem it doesn’t need to be fixed, and reading code is the least efficient way to discover problems.
The only time I look at code is when something isn’t right and I ask for a root cause analysis. The LLM will show me some offending code or code for reference or evidence and then I quite often say “well that’s dumb you should do it like this instead” but I never need to actually go into the files. I do sometimes look at a git status or git diff.
I’ve been using mostly deepseek v4, kimi k2.6, and gpt 5.3-codex
I sometimes chuck a few tokens to gpt 5.5 and opus 4.8 and they can sometimes solve a problem one of the other models couldn’t, but they’re not like 10x better or anything in my experience. More like 1.2x better
I always rebase the worktree back to the source branch before merging, and resolve conflicts on the branch. I have a resolve conflicts skill and just say:
echo “resolve conflicts” | runpi
Where runpi is my pi -p wrapper. I’ve never had a regression from it, but it gives me a report at the end so I can double check the decisions if I need to.
The skill is basically don’t use automatic resolvers, err on the side of including both sides, refer to recent commits, missions and runfiles for context and in your report to me use real branch names not HEAD and incoming because I can never remember what those refer to.
“ Automatic Prefix Caching (APC in short) caches the KV cache of existing queries, so that a new query can directly reuse the KV cache if it shares the same prefix with one of the existing queries, allowing the new query to skip the computation of the shared part.”
I tried a pro model out the other day and thought there must have been a bug in Pi’s cost calculations. But no, it’s absolutely fucking insane. Wasn’t even any better at the task.
https://www.benkophone.com/