> A messy codebase is still cheaper to send ten agents through than to staff a team around. And even if the agents need ten days to reason through an unfamiliar system, that is still faster and cheaper than most development teams operating today. The liability argument holds in a human-to-human or agent-to-human world. In an agent-to-agent world, it largely dissolves.

What experience is this guy basing this on? My guess is absolutely none at all.

Maybe this will be the case in the future, but as of right now if I cut 10 agents loose for 10 days one of our repos at work and tell them to clean it up but but keep the tests passing, we’d be drowning in support tickets.

Tests don’t cover all observable behavior. Every single production bug we’ve had made it through the test suite.

Also this guy only had a vague idea of how platform engineering teams work in large organizations.

Platform teams are the engineering org’s immune system. They’re how we fight back against the tech debt accumulated by the relentless march of features of the week.

If anything the extra code people are cranking out with AI make them more necessary.