So many teams are about to discover that their software practices are worse than they thought. Undocumented scripts, magical local setup, flaky tests, tribal-knowledge architecture, vague tickets, inconsistent naming, and “every senior engineer does it a little differently.” Humans just learned to absorb it. Agents expose this silliness immediately. An underspecified environment doesn’t create creativity; it creates garbage. If you drop an agent into a messy codebase and it flails, that’s not necessarily an indictment of the agent. Often it’s a very efficient audit of your engineering discipline. The repo is finally telling the truth about itself.
Which is why I’d now say that my suggestion that AI coding requires developers to become better managers was true, if incomplete. Yes, developers need to become better managers of machines. But more importantly, they need to become better engineers in the old-fashioned sense: better at specifications, boundaries, “golden paths,” etc. The agent era rewards discipline far more than cleverness, and that’s probably overdue.
So no, the big story of coding agents isn’t that they can write code. Plain chatbots could already fake that part. The big story is that they are changing what competent software engineering looks like. Agents reward exactly the things developers have long claimed to value but often avoided in practice: explicitness, consistency, testability, and proof. In the age of agents, boring software engineering doesn’t just scale better, it does most everything—collaboration, debugging, etc.—better.
