If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

This idea that you can get good results from a bad process as long as you have good quality control seems… dubious, to say the least. “Sure, it’ll produce endless broken nonsense, but as long as someone is checking, it’s fine.” This, generally, doesn’t really work. You see people _try_ it in industry a bit; have a process which produces a high rate of failures, catch them in QA, rework (the US car industry used to be notorious for this). I don’t know of any case where it has really worked out.

Imagine that your boss came to you, the tech lead of a small team, and said “okay, instead of having five competent people, your team will now have 25 complete idiots. We expect that their random flailing will sometimes produce stuff that kinda works, and it will be your job to review it all.” Now, you would, of course, think that your boss had gone crazy. No-one would expect this to produce good results. But somehow, stick ‘AI’ on this scenario, and a lot of people start to think “hey, maybe that could work.”

> Imagine that your boss came to you, the tech lead of a small team, and said “okay, instead of having five competent people, your team will now have 25 complete idiots. We expect that their random flailing will sometimes produce stuff that kinda works, and it will be your job to review it all.”

This is exactly the point of corporate Agile. Management believes that the locus of competence in an organization should reside within management. Depending on competent programmers is thus a risk, and what is sought is a process that can simulate a highly competent programmer's output with a gang of mediocre programmers. Kinda like the myth that you can build one good speaker out of many crappy ones, or the principle of RAID which is to use many cheap, failure-prone drives to provide the reliability guarantees of one expensive, reliable drive (which also kinda doesn't work if the drives came from the same lot and are prone to fail at about the same time). Every team could use some sort of process, but usually if you want to retain good people, this takes the form of "disciplines regarding branching, merging, code review/approval, testing, CI, etc." Something as stifling as Scrum risks scaring your good people away, or driving them nuts.

So yes, people do expect it to work, all the time. And with AI in the mix, it now gains very nice "labor is more fungible with capital" properties. We're going to see some very nice, spectacular failures in the next few years as a result, a veritable Perseid meteor shower of critical systems going boom; and those companies that wish to remain going concerns will call in human programmers to clean up the mess (but probably lowball on pay and/or try to get away with outsourcing to places with dirt-cheap COL). But it'll still be a rough few years for us while management in many orgs gets high off their own farts.