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Coding agents, vibe coding, and the review problem
I have been shipping software since 2004. Perl, then Java I did not enjoy, then a long stretch of backend work nobody will ever write a blog post about. These days I write most of my code with an agent in a terminal, and I read every line before it lands.
That puts me in an awkward middle. I am not a sceptic — the tools are genuinely good now, and I would not go back. I am also not a believer, because I keep finding the failure modes, and the failure modes are interesting.
A few things I think are true, offered so you know my bias:
- The bottleneck was never typing. It was understanding, and it still is.
- Review is the new writing. We have not built the tools or the habits for that yet, and it shows.
- "It compiles and the tests pass" was always a weak signal. It is now an actively misleading one.
- Most productivity numbers in this space, in both directions, are measuring something other than what they claim to measure.
17 posts
- #0017 Code nobody read, that you can trust anyway
- #0016 One hour to a prototype, a hundred to a product
- #0015 An ext4 driver arrived at OpenBSD with no author
- #0014 Seven hours, $400 of tokens, 13,000 lines of Go
- #0013 We wave through a third of the malicious requests
- #0012 Rootly gave up on small pull requests
- #0011 Spotify moved the bottleneck and said so
- #0010 npm puts a human back in front of the registry
- #0009 119 developers on what the habit has done to them
- #0008 Review is the new writing
- #0007 Good Vibrations: somebody studied the joy
- #0006 The 19% slowdown study, revisited by the people who ran it
- #0005 DORA puts a number on the tuition
- #0004 Asking the model to "make it more secure" five times makes it less secure
- #0003 Somebody is finally counting the CVEs
- #0002 GitHub ponders a kill switch for pull requests
- #0001 Diff #0001