There should be more willingness to have agents loudly fail with loud TODOs rather than try and 1 shot everything.

At the very least, agentic systems must have distinct coders and verifiers. Context rot is very real, and I've found with some modern prompting systems there are severe alignment failures (literally 2023 LLM RL levels of stubbing out and hacking tests just to get tests "passing"). It's kind of absurd.

I would rather an agent make 10 TODO's and loudly fail than make 1 silent fallback or sloppy architectural decision or outright malicious compliance.

This wouldn't work in a real company because this would devolve into office politics and drudgery. But agents don't have feelings and are excellent at synthesis. Have them generate their own (TEMPORARY) data.

Agents can be spun off to do so many experiments and create so many artifacts, and furthermore, a lot more (TEMPORARY) artifacts is ripe for analysis by other agents. Is the theory, anyways.

The effectively platonic view that we just need to keep specifying more and more formal requirements is not sustainable. Many top labs are already doing code review with AI because of code output.