Jest creator Nakazawa: six engineering values that matter more as coding agents speed up
bibryam · x · 2026-09-02
Former Meta/Jest engineer Christoph Nakazawa reflects on which engineering values still matter now that coding agents write his code.
- His recent output proves the point: Rust features for Vite+ (90% AI-written, in a language he doesn't know), plus fate 1.0, Codiff, Athena Crisis and Void, all 100% AI-written. Agents now match or beat his hand-written code, in minutes instead of weeks.
- He says he rarely writes code by hand anymore — even built a custom Pokémon ROM hack over websockets in about five prompts for an internal all-hands.
- Six values that matter more when agents get faster:
- Strong ownership — humans remain fully accountable
- Taste — deciding what to build and judging quality becomes the scarce skill
- Strict guardrails & fast feedback loops
- Context in the repo
- Own your stack
- Option value
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