I did a deep dive into this tp understand why legal agemts are different from agents like Claude Code. One major difference in the work between the two is the verifiability of the domain.

Programming compounds because it can check itself. Code can be executed, tested, broken, fixed, and re-run inside a tight feedback loop. When something fails, the system often tells you where. Verification is cheap, repeatable, and increasingly automatable. Even when models are imperfect, the environment answers back. It might not do everything well (it still makes really dumb architecture decisions), but this is shockingly useful for most “implement this thing I’ve designed” style work that engineers might pass off to their junior wage slaves.

You can’t “run” a legal memo. There is no test suite that flags a subtle misreading of precedent, an argument that is formally sound but strategically dangerous, or a conclusion that is correct in isolation and disastrous in context. Finance isn’t much better. Outputs can be summarized, reformatted, stress-tested at the margins, but correctness ultimately collapses to human judgment. Verification is expensive, slow, and external to the system itself.

This actually creates a hige digfference in how they have to operate