With of the remarkable benefits of agentic tools for software development comes a frustrating paradox: they also make good software development more difficult.
There is a bottleneck between the production of code and integrating it safely into a code base. OpenAI Codex. Claude Code and other tools can generate code much faster than it can be reviewed.
And it needs reviewed. The agentic tools can be unpredictable and are not, completely, trustworthy. Any substantial project can be overwhelmed with pull requests. The software team struggles to maintain quality because of the amount of diligent work needed to validate updates.
One negative consequence of speedy software is the possibility of bad code. The agentic coding tools generally make a good product, so the process has a weakness that the team may mistakenly take what they are given as correct. An additional gotcha is that they can get code that is correct but accompanied with comments that are wrong. This sets the stage for the everyone to believe the non-code products, letting both the developers and future coding agents be unaware of the time bomb hiding there.
An alternate world could solve this problem and allow the bounty of code development tools attain their full potential:
In our world, the updates now may hide subtle code change mistakes. In this alternate reality, the coding tools would be deterministic. Once the programmer develops an update, the pull request would consist of a series of commands to software agents. The commands could be evaluated at face value because they would precisely describe what the update will do. An update request would be a concrete proposal. Also those commands could be evaluated with AI tools specialized to identify their loopholes. That could protect against the update’s bugs being undetected.
Since AI development tools usually produce good results, their subtle errors might be accepted because, by reputation, they will usually be correct. That is a critical flaw. If the request could be a description of the change rather than the change itself, the agentic tools could be even more powerful than they already are.
