Is reviewing AI even possible?

Earlier today, I shared a challenge. I couldn’t figure out the data encoding in those thumbnails, and I hoped someone well versed in image processing would have ideas. I also feared someone would feed it to an AI and dump me the results. Well, both happened! One person, Henry, figured out and explained the storage format to me, and I updated my algorithm from his explanation. His explanation was: “It’s actually 40*30 pixels instead of 80*60; and it encodes each pixel in 16 bits, RGGB (4/8/4 bits), in strides of 80 bytes consisting of 40*RGG then 40*B”. Another person submitted the problem to Claude, and gave me the resulting code. The code works. It also has implemented a few options, for some reason… but I didn’t use it. I would still be trying to understand the blob of code that Claude regurgitated if Henry hadn’t given me a good explanation. I tried dismantling Claude’s code to the bare minimum that would work and not have twelve bells and whistles, but it was horribly complicated…