I would love to see an experiment done like this with an arena of principal engineer agents. Give each of them a unique personality: this one likes shiny new objects and is willing to deal with early adopter pain, this one is a neckbeard who uses emacs as pid 1 and sends email via usb thumbdrive, and the third is a pragmatic middle of the road person who can help be the glue between them. All decisions need to reach a quorum before continuing. Better yet: each agent is running on a completely different model from a different provider. 3 can be a knob you dial up to 5, 10, etc. Each of these agents can spawn sub-agents, to reach out to professionals like a CSS export, or a DBA.

I think prompt engineering could help here a bit, adding some context on what a quality codebase is, remove everything that is not necessary, consider future maintainability (20->84k lines is a smell). All of these are smells that like a simple supervisor agent could have caught.