Here’s “Uncle” Bob Martin’s latest: a reply to someone’s question about how much to trust agentic coding output:
I’m significantly older than you. I started coding in the late 60s. My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents. That’s the only way I can take advantage of their productivity. What I do instead is to surround the agents with extreme constraints. Unit tests, gherkin tests, QA procedures, quality metrics, mutation testing, test coverage, and a plethora of others. In the end, I have very high confidence in the code they produce because they’ve had to run the gauntlet of all of my constraints and tests.
Right, first off: “I’m significantly older than you” LOL at that as an argument. I’m Very Old too. Touché, Bob! Although to be fair, he’s responding to someone else mentioning their age as a reason for finding adaption difficult.
God, I was so bitchy about Bob when I first drafted this post. You have no idea how much I’ve toned it down. Reading Bob pisses me off because his bombastic tone masks a lack of any valuable insight. Not reading any of the code is the only way you can take advantage of agentic productivity? Really? This overly-confident tone lacks any kind of nuance that will enable you to take actionable points away.
And breathe.
Let’s tackle the actual question: your agents have written some code. How much should you, personally, directly interact with said code?
The answer is, as ever, “it depends”. But what does it depend on? There are lots of interesting aspects here, but if you’re looking for one single signal, it’s the degree to which humans will want to directly interact with that code in the future. Yourself included. Assuming that you are human.
At one extreme, humans will never interact with that code. Gas Town, pretty much. But just because Bob is currently living in Gas Town, you don’t have to live there.
So where should you live? Where do I live? It’s a very different neighbourhood from “Gas Town”. Slower. More human. Maybe I’ll be somewhere else tomorrow. The point is that you should think about where you want to live.
So you should ask around: Kent Beck is writing thoughtfully about this area right now, for instance. It’s at time like this that I most miss Gerald Weinberg, who would have been so very interested in what’s going on.
And a final piece of advice; be very careful about people who know nothing about you telling you how to interact with the code in your organisation. There is a wide spectrum, ranging from “I will let the agents do everything and will never look at it myself” to “I will never let an agent near this code”. You should make up your own mind about this.