Uncle Bob says he trusts agents only after tests and constraints, not by reading their code
tokenbender · x · 2026-07-24
- A screenshot of Uncle Bob Martin’s post says he is now older than everyone else and started coding in the late 1960s.
- His current strategy is not to read code written by agents.
- Instead, he wraps agents in strict constraints: unit tests, Gherkin tests, QA procedures, quality metrics, mutation testing, test coverage, and more.
- The idea is that if agents must run through a gauntlet of constraints and tests, he can trust the output without micromanaging the generated code.
- In a reply, he says code quality still matters a lot because messy code slows agents down, so he still enforces strong structure and avoids letting them create tangles.
Related event: Uncle Bob Stops Reading AI Code, Trusts Tests and Constraints(10 posts)→
More from coding & agent
- The browser main thread is expensive: a practical guide to JavaScript and CSS animation cost — jh3yy · 2026-09-11
- Inspired by OpenAI's 10,000-agent run, dev open-sources a crowdsourced agent problem-solving platform — Benjaminsen · 2026-09-11
- Lucid: open-source Mac app keeps your laptop awake only while AI agents run — Pitiful_Hedgehog_600 · 2026-09-11
- banteg's snail project crowdsources AI agents to finish matching Snail Mail's 20 remaining functions — banteg · 2026-09-11
- Alex Townsend posts 200 open problems in numerical linear algebra for humans and AI agents — IgorCarron · 2026-09-11
- Kimi K2.8 Preview rolls out: near-K3 coding performance, 1M context for all tiers — teortaxesTex · 2026-09-11