The value of a skilled developer is shifting toward the ability to effectively review code. Although generating code now is easier than ever, evaluating it for proper decomposition, correctness, efficiency, and security is still important. To see why it's important to understand generated code and to recognize what lies beneath a program's elegant syntax, let's look at a small project called markus, created using Claude Opus. The markus project While searching for an AI-generated project, I came across markus . This is a single-header library for parsing text and converting it to HTML. It was created using Claude Opus 4.5. I liked that the library is tiny. You can browse through it and even dive into exploring individual code snippets. When faced with a lot of code right off the bat, you don't even feel like starting to look into it. The library consists of a single file, markus.h , containing 6,484 lines of C++20 code. In reality, there's even less code.…