I get this question a lot, and I found it hard to answer briefly, so I ended up writing a longer post about how I work:

https://www.trigosec.com/insights/mob-programming-for-one/

The short version is that I don’t let AI agents work unsupervised on my code. I treat them like participants in a mob programming session instead of autonomous developers. Different agents get different roles (implementer, reviewer, architect, security reviewer, etc.), and I stay involved throughout the process.

I also agree with your point about architecture. Generating isolated components is relatively easy; preserving and evolving the architectural boundaries across a larger codebase is much harder.

We’re still missing a good way to express and measure architectural quality. Until then, architecture heavy work requires much closer supervision than implementation heavy work

> We’re still missing a good way to express and measure architectural quality

Architectural complexity[1]! There’s several really good papers on this.

Unfortunately it never caught on and we don’t have great automated tools to spit out a number. Also the majority of people just don’t care enough. Research in this field kinda died out when we invented microservices and started treating those as a silver bullet to The Architecture Problem (it’s not [2])

[1] https://swizec.com/blog/why-taming-architectural-complexity-...

[2] https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ

> The short version is that I don’t let AI agents work unsupervised on my code. I treat them like participants in a mob programming session instead of autonomous developers.

I wonder if OS maintainers would have a leg up in defining workflows to better leverage this. Of course, OS contributors are autonomous developers, but maybe a trick or two might transfer across