I’m sure we’ll all learn a lot from these early days of agentic coding.
So far what I am learning (from watching all of this) is that our constant claims that quality and security matter seem to not be true on average. Depressingly.
But as agents move from prototypes to production, the calculus changes. Production systems need: - Memory continuity across sessions - Predictable behavior across updates - Security boundaries that don't leak
The tools that prioritize these will win the enterprise market. The ones that don't will stay in the prototype/hobbyist space.
We're still in the "move fast" phase, but the "break things" part is starting to hurt real users. The pendulum will swing back.
Only for the non-pro users. After all, those users were happy to use excel to write the programs.
What we're seeing now is that more and more developers find they are happy with even less determinism than the Excel process.
Maybe they're right; maybe software doesn't need any coherence, stability, security or even correctness. Maybe the class of software they produce doesn't need those things.
I, unfortunately, am unable to adopt this view.
I'm 13 years into this industry, this is the first I'm hearing of this.
Also most of the long running enterprise projects I’ve seen - there was one that had been around for like 10 years and like about 75% of the devs I hadn’t even heard of and none of the original ones were in the project at all.
The thing had no less than three auditing mechanisms, three ways of interacting with the database, mixed naming conventions, like two validation mechanisms none of which were what Spring recommended and also configurations versioned for app servers that weren’t even in use.
This was all before AI, it’s not like you need it for projects to turn into slop and AI slop isn’t that much different from human slop (none of them gave a shit about ADRs or proper docs on why things are done a certain way, though Wiki had some fossilized meeting notes with nothing actually useful) except that AI can produce this stuff more quickly.
When encountered, I just relied on writing tests and reworking the older slop with something newer (with better AI models and tooling) and the overall quality improved.
All code is not fungible, "irreverent code that kinda looks okay at first glance" might be a commodity, but well-tested, well-designed and well-understood code is what's valuable.
Code today can be as verbose and ugly as ever, because from here on out, fewer people are going to read it, understand and care about it.
What's valuable, and you know this I think, is how much money your software will sell for, not how fine and polished your code is.
Code was a liability. Today it's a liability that cost much much less.
How much value are you going to be able to extract over its lifetime once your customers want to see some additional features or improvements?
How much expensive maintenance burden are you incurring once any change (human or LLM generated) is likely to introduce bugs you have no better way of identifying than shipping to your paying customers?
Maybe LLM+tooling is going to get there with producing a comprehensible and well tested system but my anectodal experience is not promising. I find that AI is great until you hit its limit on a topic and then it will merrily generate tokens in a loop suggesting the same won't-work-fix forever.
The whole thing reminds me a bit of the many RAD tools that were supposed to 'solve' programming. While it was easy to start and produce something with those tools, at some point you started spending way too much time working around the limitations and wished you started from scratch without it.
[1] https://museumoffailure.com/exhibition/wonka-chocolate-exper...
There are limits to what even AI can do to code, within practical time-limits. Using AI also costs money. So, easier it is to maintain and evolve a piece of software, the cheaper it will be to the owners of that application.
Code that has not been thoroughly tested is a greater liability, not a lesser one.l, the faster you can write it.
I expect that from something guiding the market, but there have been times where stuff changes, and it isn't even clear if it is a bug or a permanent decision. I suspect they don't even know.