everything i know about managing agents i learned from the amazing programmers and computer scientists that came before

constraints in your codebase are freeing for both humans and agents! this has always been true, but if you were a small dev team you likely never had to think that deeply because you could trust your fellow programmers to write code and review well

but large companies have had to solve this problem since even before agents. because before you had agent slop, you had human slop. lots of engineers wrote bad code out of necessity (eg backend engineer forced to write frontend or reverse). the solution to this was constraints: lint rules, smarter compilers and diagnostics, high quality tests, investments into observability, and so on

the arrival of agents just means that big company problems are now everyone's problems. the good news is that none of this is really that novel: it's just good engineering

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqmsQeSzMdw