We can build precise, scalable things from imprecise parts.
Since its early days, there is a lot of discussion and criticism of this idea - fair enough. But I think it misses the point. The thing to look at isn’t whether agentic coding can do all of the things we do with software today - that would be nice, but in neither of my examples above does the new system replace the old one entirely. There are still bespoke craftsmen, handmade objects, and mainframes.
The point instead is that agentic coding is not about eliminating mistakes; it’s about engineering the substrate, so mistakes don’t matter. We can see the pattern, we think the models have gotten to a point of stability where they are usable4 for a system like this, and we can see first light.