Article URL: https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/07/09/write-code.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48878195 Points: 36 # Comments: 15

It’s our job to build the software factory - not just the software. Software engineers maintain the assembly line allowing anyone to prompt for a change and ship immediately. We set up the infrastructure that makes agents successful. We act proactively through prompts (skills, AGENTS.md, knowledge bases etc). We protect software reactively through automated evaluation (tests, linting, type systems, evals, other AI, etc). It all keeps the agent on track. Even a stupid model, with fresh context, can work within these constraints and produce a good-enough change. It starts to seem ridiculous to even look at the code. And definitely laughable to ever want to write code. Even with Fable-like intelligence humans get value from writing code. Not because agents are worse at coding that humans. But to think directly in the execution environment, not proxied through English. It’s about attention and understanding. To keep my attention, I must go beyond ‘read code’ like a passive observer of agents from afar. To really connect with the architecture of the system, it helps to truly experience the code. I don’t want your flat 2D system of diffs and patches. From time-to-time, I need the full, 4DX virtual reality experience with pain sensors attached to my nethers to experience what’s happening. And no, it’s not because this “code isn’t pretty”, it’s about experiencing fragility. If it’s hard for me to build on top of this code without something breaking, it’ll harder for an agent to make sense of it. If I can clean it up, then document a consistent principle about the architecture, without half-a-dozen exceptions the software factory works better. If I can debug, find where the testing strategy is weak, and find a fix I can squash an entirely new class of bugs. Yeah, you can do that without writing code. I’m not going to lecture you, call you slop-kitty, and say the only way to really experience software is by a magnetized needle and a steady hand. I, too, am infected with AI Psychosis. The vast majority of my code is AI generated. Nevertheless, I find writing code to be a useful tool. I encourage others to do it. I struggle to pay attention when I’m just a reverse centaur. When I read and approve code, I observe I don’t have the same sense of ownership. Slop flies under the radar. It’s harder to micro-adjust. And in the long run slop hurts agents too. The fragility accumulates precisely because we’re not paying attention to the details. On the other hand, when the human does some work, spikes an approach, and then the agent stamps out the patterns I participate and own the result.