Code quality has always been ONE factor; it’s never been always the most important. Eg we often accept complex internals as the price for a clean external API; and we all write sloppy code for one-offs, prototypes, etc. So part of me accepts the “code quality doesn’t matter” argument. I can see a vision of agentic engineering with systems that prove correctness; if an agent produces code that is provably correct, maybe the quality really doesn’t matter! (2/5)

I’m far from convinced that this is actually possible. It’s certainly not now — and I’m not talking about models. Testing and verification tools are nowhere near where they’d need to be, regardless of model quality. Today, code quality DOES still matter; even the best-case version of agentic engineering can’t produce code that’ll never require maintenance. But I can see a possible future where code quality might not matter, or will matter a lot less, and that’s FASCINATING. (3/5)

Specifically what I find fascinating is: the tooling that would be required to make agentic engineering begin to live up to the hype — much better testing tools, formal business logic specification languages, more powerful and easier to use formal verification tools, better static analysis tooling, etc — would be massively useful to software engineering quite regardless of the existence/utility/quality of LLMs. (4/5)