[starkparker]

This sets up a pointless strawman about reviews for the headline that distracts so much from the point that I only caught it on second read:

Restrict agentic workflows to implementation details, hand-write the higher-level logic and critical tests, and only pay attention to whether those human-written tests pass or fail. Then you don't have to worry about reviewing agent-generated code as long as the human-written tests about the functionality pass.

(Still not sure I agree, not least of which for security and performance reasons at existing orgs; this assumes very good test coverage and design exist before any code is written. Interesting for greenfield projects though.)

[9rx]

> this assumes very good test coverage and design exist before any code is written.

Does it? In the olden days when hand-coding everything was the only way, you'd write a single test, implement what is necessary for it to pass, and then repeat until you have the full set of functionality covered. Your design would also emerge out of that process.

Which, conveniently, is also how AI seems to work best in this role. i.e. Give it a minimal task and then keep iteratively expanding upon it with more and more bits of information until finally reaching completion. So, in theory, I'm not sure anything has changed.

But the roundtrip time on the agents today is excruciatingly slow, so the question is: Does the typical developer have enough fortitude to stick with it from start to finish without looking for shortcuts to speed up the process? It may not be practical for that reason.

[Firfi]

Thank you (twice!) for reading it. The idea wrapped in a scandalous topic indeed, but the PR process ambiguity was also what was the last straw for me to write it.