Coding Agents: Driving In Gears

The Value of Understanding Code In an agentic engineering world, what is the value of the code? We set the agent a goal, provide the requirements and the behaviors the system should exhibit, and ask it to write code to deliver them. When that is done, do we review the output, correct it, and iterate toward an outcome? Or is the code something ephemeral we regenerate as needed and never really read? Is it an artifact we care about, or a by-product? The answer decides where and how we apply human engineering effort, and how much work we let the agent do before any review: one task, all of them, or something in between. In this post, we tackle that question: First, why the code is still worth reading, even when an agent writes it. Second, why that makes our certainty — not a fixed choice of human-in- or human-out-of-the-loop — the variable that should drive how we work. Third, a practical model, borrowed from Kent Beck, for turning that certainty into a decision about how big a step to…