Coding agents create an opportunity for shorter coding times, faster iteration, and shorter feedback loops. That opportunity is wasted if we don’t solve for all the reasons a software project can go sideways that aren’t “we couldn’t type fast enough”.
“Lowering the cost of writing code was the thing that no engineering leader asked for, but it’s the thing we got.”
— Kellan Elliott-McCrea, Vibe Coding for Teams, Thoughts to Date
“The last part: once you’ve created a situation where failure is safe … you need to be prepared to let failure happen.”
— Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Make Failure A (Safe) Option
If teams are (still) afraid to slip a deadline, accidentally ship a bug, or cause an unforeseen performance problem, there’s still a problem. All the LLMs and coding agents in the world won’t fix it for you.
The more failure is a socially acceptable reality and tool-supported via feature flags, fast rollbacks, observability, blue-green releases, etc. the better your team will operate. A small part of this is building better tooling for detecting, recovering, and remediating surprises. The majority of the effort is in leaders supporting the team and the team supporting each other in stressful times. 🧠