alt Hacker NewsFor me it breaks the rule of "Network of trust".
Software works because someone is accountable for it. Pair Programming, Test Driven Development, and now Agentic coding all to one degree or another damage the network of trust.
- Pair Programming (There is no one person accountable for the change.) - Test Driven Development (The test pass, so my software is good) - Agentic Coding (My prompt was good, so my software is good)
AI is great for software development... As long as you review and understand each change it makes. Because YOU are going to be held accountable for what the software does.
Replies
How does opensource software work when nobody is accountable when I run software from GitHub?
This is the exact mentality behind corporate software and why nobody gets fired for using IBM, Oracle, Azure...
Accountability is a poor proxy for quality because there are so many ways to frame an incident never those responsible really get accountable.
Software works because developers care about the product. If something goes wrong the entire team is accountable, so they work together on something as one.
I don't think pairing, nor TDD come anywhere close to the abdication of responsibility that agentic programming does.