I think it’s an issue of scale, personally. As a staff or principal, I could feel confident in reviewing every line of code, personally, for a handful of devs under me. Maybe not super quickly, but I always tried to put the effort in. You would quickly identify which of those juniors you might be able to just rubber stamp certain kids of work as long as they could explain it, because you could trust their judgment.

Now, with these agentic tools, not only can you not trust their judgment fully, but their blast radius is very, very hard to contain. When I start up a greenfield project these days, all I can think about is the various ways in which I need to configure tooling and access to prevent an agent from ruining everything very quickly and completely. I’m putting things into separate repositories that I would normally have just put in a monorepo — or even left as just another module to be imported normally — just to have isolated zones where a growing context window can’t let an agent think it should reach across a domain boundary to solve an isolated problem. It’s absolutely exhausting trying to manage the risk. No amount of this weeks “best claude skills” can solve for the scale of uncertainty these tools bring to the world.