A post written by Meenakshi Tripathy reminded me of an old Meta motto: you shouldn’t confuse speed with progress.
Personally I’m less concerned about PMs writing code to production. Because PMs should, and will, focus on orchestration. I worry about Engineers writing 10x more code, because, well, they can. And are also, in 2026, expected to.
We’ve all seen the demos. An agent spins up a plan, touches 15 files, and hands you a completed feature in 45 seconds. It feels like 10x. But in a high-scale environment 10x speed without 10x rigor is just 10x gap.
“Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed.”
– Milan Kundera, Slowness.
As we move from “Copilots” to “Agents” we are hitting a friction point where our traditional safeguards are buckling. Here is where the real challenge lives IMHO:
1. The “Diff Review” Fatigue
When a human writes a 20-file diff, they can explain every line. When an agent does it, the human reviewer (and the author!) often defaults to “vibe checking”. If the logic looks sound and the tests pass, we ship. But “looks sound” is how subtle architectural drift happens. We risk becoming “Code Janitors”, only cleaning up the obvious mess while missing the underlying rot.
2. Testing vs. Verification
Agents are great at writing tests that pass. They are less great at knowing if they are testing the right thing. At our scale, “it works” isn’t the bar; “it doesn’t break a downstream dependency three layers away” is. Agents often optimize for the local task but lack the global context of our massive infra.
3. The Experimentation Blindspot
In a culture driven by A/B testing and stats, agents often miss the “why”. They can implement a feature, but can they reason about the long-term impact on a specific metric or the edge cases of a complex rollout? We risk shipping features that are technically correct but strategically hollow.
4. The Standard is the Ceiling
A “high standard” isn’t a checklist; it’s a culture of craftsmanship. If we outsource the thinking to agents, we lose the “why” behind our best practices. The risk isn’t just bad code – it’s the atrophy of engineering intuition.
5. Speed Breeds Silos
When an engineer’s output becomes “agent-accelerated”, a dangerous velocity gap opens up between the code and the rest of the team:
i. Engineer-to-Engineer Silos: If I can prompt a complex refactor in an hour, my teammates – who are still managing their own workloads – no longer have the bandwidth to truly understand my changes. We stop being a cohesive team and start becoming a collection of “solo-operators” who happen to share a repository.
ii. The XFN Black Box: Product Managers, Designers and Data Scientists rely on the “friction” of the development process to provide input. When the time from Idea to Diff shrinks to near zero, we bypass the critical “Wait, should we even do this?” conversations.
iii. Technical Isolation: In the rush to ship, we stop documenting the why. If an agent generates the solution, the engineer might not fully internalize the tradeoffs, making it nearly impossible to explain the technical debt to a PM or a successor six months down the line.
We aren’t just moving faster; we’re moving away from each other. High velocity without high communication turns “collaboration” into “notification”.
So what is the path forward? I think we should use the time saved by agents to focus on these principles:
1. Review for Intent: Don’t just check if the code runs; check if the agent understood the system.
2. Deliberate Friction: Over-communicate with XFN. 10x coding requires 10x alignment.
3. The “Janitor” Rule: If you wouldn’t have written it that way yourself, don’t let the agent ship it.
Speed is a vanity metric. In the race to increase speed, rigor and impact, we should stay present and conscious. Because quality and collaboration are what keeps us going in this long-distance race.
