I agree that agents can produce decent code. In general, I don’t find agentic code beautiful but neither is most of the code I write. The code for ingesting CSV files into my ETL pipeline doesn’t have to be beautiful, it just has to work.

I think the bigger issue (like many things in software engineering) is a management issue. Once upon a time, I could take a look at the final output of a project and if it looked like a Ferrari on the outside, I could have some confidence that there was a good engine under the hood. OF COURSE THIS WASNT ALWAYS TRUE, but something that looked good, or was performant, or whatever, was a decent proxy for the code underneath being good. And with a smart human, there were ancillary things. Having spent 20 hours coding something, they probably thought through the edge cases that their manager, or product team hadn’t considered.

With AI, everyone’s output looks like a Ferrari, so it is hard to know what the internals are like.

A lot of people will probably look at this and say “well you need better management”, but better management has always been elusive in software engineering. Furthermore, reviewing AI generated code is soul crushing work and I don’t know who wants to do it.

In my guesstimate the number of good engineering managers out there is actually very very small and in practice, the best managers that I’ve seen are the ones who don’t think they are good managers, so they just set a very high hiring bar and hire people who don’t need much management.