Veteran Dev: The Real Line Is Handing Your Entire Codebase to the Agent
erwinalp5 · reddit · 2026-10-07
A backend developer with 14 years of experience shares his take on companies pushing AI agents.
- His company encourages agents but requires human-readable output with humans remaining responsible
- He sees the real line as whether you give the codebase entirely to the agent: treating code like assembler, describing the what while agents handle the how, producing 5000-line PRs reviewed only by another agent
- The risk: the day an agent can't fix something, a human must reverse-engineer a codebase nobody wrote — with leadership demanding an ETA every hour. From what he's seen of agent output on a bad day, we're not there yet
- In reality maintainers don't decide; throughput does. His team keeps everything human-readable, but he doubts that lasts more than a year or two — and admits he has no idea what the job looks like in 5 years
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