The question CTOs are probably not asking: is our loop closed?
Agents write code now, and everybody has questions. How fast can we ship? Which model? Which tool? How many engineers do we still need? Good questions. Not the one, though. The one almost nobody is asking is this: how are we structuring software engineering, now that the code is no longer written by the people who used to remember it?
Every trade has a loop between “it is written” and “it is right”. Newspapers have one. Kitchens have one. So do we, and we drew it on slides for decades, built some of its stations and left the rest to a person who knew the code by heart. Did it work? It did, at a cost, for exactly as long as that person was in the room. An agent produces more code than any head can hold and remembers nothing from one session to the next. The holes in the loop do not close on their own. So. Is everything lost? Run for the hills? Or is there a way to do this right?
In this series, Marlon Sousa goes around that loop station by station: what each one was when a person filled it, what changes when an agent writes the code, and what has to change around it, in the team and in the organisation, for the answer to “is that code right?” to stop depending on anybody’s memory or anybody’s nod. He draws on two projects built that way, and on the years he spent as the person in the room, on both sides of that arrangement.
5 partes publicadas até agora.
Partes
The loop ran in somebody’s head (em inglês)
Every trade has a loop between “it is written” and “it is right”. Ours too. We drew it, built half of it, and a person quietly did the rest. What that cost, and how I know. Spoiler: I was the person.
Put an agent in the chair, and the rules of the game change (em inglês)
Four rules for the moment an agent takes the writer’s chair: why you do not get to wait this one out, why a team that waits for a nod is not using agents, the one sentence about control that this series hangs on, and what happens to every estimate you have ever given.
The loop, built for real (em inglês)
Around the loop a second time, and this time built for real: the two documents the spec turns out to be, the inner loop the agent runs alone while nobody watches, the checkpoint that is one command, the second read a machine does first, a merge nobody attends a meeting for, and the letters going back to the desk.
Asking cost an engineer (em inglês)
A product owner who wanted to know whether their idea was even possible had one way to find out: interrupt somebody who was building something already decided. What that did to their work, why the two-line ticket was never laziness, and why the oldest fight in our industry was never about personalities.
A lie they told you about agents (em inglês)
Everybody was told agents only write code. They also read, and reason about what they read, and for a product owner that changes the job: feasibility with the code cited, a prototype that costs what a drawing did, and what an organisation has to assemble — training, access, an environment, a budget nobody has to justify — before the loop before the loop can close.
The station nobody draws
Ainda não publicada
How the loop reaches into the language you chose, and the one check that removes a whole class of mistakes before anybody has to remember them.