Clean Code author: I trust agent-written code only after tests and constraints
SantiDev · hn · 2026-07-28
Robert Martin says he no longer reviews code written by his agents line by line. Instead, he relies on a tight gauntlet of constraints — unit tests, gherkin tests, QA procedures, quality metrics, mutation testing, and coverage — so the agents have to prove correctness before he trusts the output.
The post frames agent coding as a system-design problem: build guardrails around the runtime, make the scripts read-only, and let the verification stack do the heavy lifting. It’s positioned as a practical template for people building local agents, memory systems, MCP tools, RAG pipelines, or other agent workflows.
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