Eighteen months ago I would have written this post about speed. About how an agent drafts in a minute what used to take me an hour. Today I'm writing it about discipline — and that shift is the whole story of the past year and a half.
I've been living in a mode where a coding agent writes a significant portion of my code for about eighteen months now. First came exhilaration, then fatigue, then a sober realization: an agent without a harness is not an engineer. It is a very fast, very forgetful junior. It can draft in a minute what would take me an hour, but in that same minute it will cheerfully take out a neighboring module, skip the tests, invent a library method that doesn't exist, and forget what we agreed on five messages ago. As a technical manager, I look at this plainly: the problem is not code generation speed. The problem is the absence of process around that generation.
Continue reading “Process Over Agent: How I Put an ECC Harness Through a Real Refactor”