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Updating Eagleson's Law in the age of agentic AI
Eagleson's Law states
"Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else."
I keep reading how fewer and fewer of the brightest developers are writing code and letting their AI agent to do it all. How do they know what's really happening? Does it matter anymore?
Curious to hear this communities thoughts
My philosophy with agentic coding is that I need to be in the loop. I still write code myself and when the agent writes code I sign off on a detailed plan, with code, in advance, and then review the results.
The times where I have let that slip, I've regretted it.
Right now I believe what's happening is that a lot of developers are letting it slip, the regret is pending. Though in large orgs where there's less personal stake, and potentially everyone is vibecoding, I expect there won't be much personal regret.
I think there are essentially two possible outcomes: One, agents get so much better that true vibecoding becomes viable and the agents can fix the industry wide mess that's currently silently happening in the background. Or two, practices will need to change to keep humans in the loop.
I suspect many teams have already learned to do the latter, vibecoding at scale simply can't work for production if you care about quality and reliability.
I suppose there is a third option: The industry lowers its standards of quality and reliability. I think this strategy is currently being beta tested at scale. The upside is that it should increase the perceived value of high quality software and the people who can deliver it.
Side note: I've revisited 6 month old code plenty of times and almost immediately understood what I was thinking. Other times not so much, but we remember complex details about things that happened 6 months ago all the time. It's possible that Eagleson's law primarily applies to Eagleson.
Before it was 99.999% uptime. Now it's been 'move fast and break things' for over a decade.
The 5 9's are still highly in demand, but the fact that 3 companies have the ability to knock out half the internet for an afternoon, and do with some regularity, tells me that quality hasn't been a priority for years.
It's now not your code from the start (outside of having your name on the commit) so I don't think the adage changes much in that regard.
I don't think there's necessarily anything inherently wrong with that, but your role changes to be more like a maintainer of an open source project: other people submit pull requests and it's up to you to approve and merge or give feedback or reject outright, and as the face of the project you're responsible for the outcome if you let a bad commit in even if you didn't write it. The difference is there aren't other people directly involved for better or worse and it's a game of prompts for the feature request and feedback instead.
We evolved a saying at my first dev job: