We are leaning into a kind of federated model. The core applications and vibe-coded satellites. The core apps have stricter requirements and carefully considered API guardrails. Go ham on the AI apps. If you break something, the scope of destruction is much more limited.

That said, the core apps are still full of AI code. I don't see a reality where hand-written code can or will be curated and sequestered. It's unenforceable, too slow, and too expensive.

I think so too. And it is how codebases are managed implicitly anyhow. You don’t let anyone PR against core functionality, you keep that API under lock and key.

But UI on top of a good API should be unable to cause problems; the API must prevent invalid state etc. So letting LLM’s write UI code for CRUD-apps (which is most of them…) seems fine to me.

Well. One of the things that's critical in all that analogy is that the BigBallOfMud that one user creates on Shopify cannot impact the other users - that's why Shopify can keep the platform from becoming ABigBallofMud.

In order to be able to enforce this hard boundary, it means that one "agent generated code" in one place, not only "can call a strictly defined set of APIs" - but, more importantly, it implements an isolated piece of functionality. Think something like: I let the AI write the dashboards, so the dashboards may be slow, crappy, incorrect, whatever - but it doesn't impact the rest of the product. However, I can't let AI write "metrics collection" because that not only impacts dashboard, but potentially impacts core product efficiency too (memory consumption, cpu, IO, etc.)

100% can guarantee the balls of mud be connected making giant balls of mud

>Maybe things will evolve into projects having a well-defined, hard boundary between agents generated code and human generated code.

The only way things will evolve is towards maximizing AI generated code and minimizing human involvement because that is the most efficient mode for getting product to market. Any trend to the contrary is temporary, paperclip maximizer will maximize. Any code that humans touch directly will be considered implicitly too risky to run in any production environment.

We'll just have to hope things don't break too much and when they do, we'll just have to accept it because no human will be able to (or allowed to, or even trusted to) fix it.