alt Hacker News> They are what keep the AI's output from drifting into unmaintainable spaghetti code. Without those strict constraints, agentic coding falls apart fast.
Which ones, ESLint and Prettier and so on? Those are just for "nice syntax", and doesn't actually help your agent with what they actually fall over themselves with, which is about the design of your software, not what specific syntax they use.
To be clear, I'm not saying they solve high-level software design.
The goal is to prevent the agent from getting derailed by basic noise. Forcing it to deal with strict TS errors, dead code (Knip), or broken formatting in the feedback loop keeps the context clean.
It’s less about architecting the app and more about giving the agent immediate stderr signals so it stays on the rails.