feedThoughts on the New Coding
12 May, 2026Talking to friends, I’m realizing there are a decent number of people who either aren’t reviewing agent-written code at all, or are just having another agent review it.
Maybe it’s fine
This is probably fine for side projects, throwaway prototypes, or one-off commands in bigger repos that can be tossed at any time. Maybe it’s yet another argument for microservices.
Agents are pretty good at avoiding and catching simple bugs: nil panics, obvious logic goofs, that kind of thing.
But what about code that needs to keep growing for a year?
Did it actually do what you wanted?
I’ve seen agents take shortcuts to make things “work.” Maybe they return a hard-coded string that makes it look like progress is happening.
But they can also take long cuts: building whole data-storage models when a simple link would have worked.
How are you testing the changes? Are you manually walking through each one? Do you have end-to-end tests? Who reviews the end-to-end tests?
Did it compromise the code to get there?
Did it add three if statements when one would have made more sense? Did it sling more code into the file that’s already 1,000 lines long? Are all your members public now?
When do agents stop and make interfaces? Why not just couple everything together by passing 10 concrete objects as inputs, especially when the agent can type faster than any human?
Many engineers never cared about this stuff in the first place. But I thought we had all agreed those were no-hires.
Am I wrong?
We’ve had capable coding agents for, what, four months?
Maybe architecture can be encoded in an AGENTS.md file, but I’m doubtful. It’s more possible that GPT-6 and whatever comes next will simply be much better at architecture. But I’m not so sure.
My current prediction: we’ll see a lot of projects start collapsing under their own weight in the next 6–12 months.
Original notes from May
- Most people never cared how the sausage was made.
- Are you reviewing your code? At what rate is debt growing?
- Microservices are going to do much better than monoliths.
- Your codebase is the best example.
- Are we all just testers now?
- How should agents coordinate if we actually parallelize?
- Is this just being a Luddite?
- Will the next generation of models blow all these concerns away?
This post was copyedited by chatgpt