23 days ago
- The role of software engineers is to build the 'software factory', including the infrastructure that enables agents to successfully prompt for changes and ship immediately.
- Proactive measures like prompts (skills, AGENTS.md, knowledge bases) and reactive protections through automated evaluation (tests, linting, type systems, evals) keep agents on track, allowing even simple models to produce good-enough changes.
- While AI-generated code is prevalent, writing code remains valuable for direct thinking in the execution environment, fostering attention, understanding, and ownership, rather than passively observing agents.
- Writing code helps experience system fragility and architectural principles, enabling cleanup, documentation, and debugging to improve the software factory and prevent sloppy code accumulation.