At a scale, I don't see a net negative of AI merging "shit by itself" if the developer (or the agent) is ensuring sufficient e2e, integration and unit test coverage prior to every merge, if in return I get my team to crank out features at a 10x speed.

The reality is that probably 99.9999% of code bases on this earth (but this might drop soon, who knows) pre-date LLMs and organizing them in a way that coding agents can produce consistent results from sprint to sprint, will need a big plumbing work from all dev teams. And that will include refactoring, documentation improvements, building consensus on architectures and of course reshaping the testing landscape. So SWE's will have a lot of dirty work to do before we reach the aforementioned "scale".

However, a lot of platforms are being built from ground-up today in a post-CC (claude code) era . And they should be ready to hit that scale today.

Yup! Software engineers aren't going to be out of work anytime soon, but I'm acting more like a CTO or VPE with a team of agents now, rather than just a single dev with a smart intern.

I hate this paradigm because it pits me against my tools as if we're adversaries. The tools are prone to rewrite or even delete the tests, so we have to write other tools to sandbox agents from each other and check each others' work, and I just don't see a way to get deterministically good results over just building shit myself. It comes down to needing high trust in my tools to feel confident in what we're shipping.