In my previous article , I argued that agentic development needs enough specification to make correctness checkable. A quick prompt can get implementation started quickly, but someone still has to decide whether the result does what we wanted. I left a fairly practical question unanswered, though. Once the agent has written the code, how should we review it?
You can give an agent a clear task and get back a serious implementation with tests. The build passes and the code looks reasonable. Now somebody has to approve the pull request, and that person has roughly the same amount of time they had before code generation became cheap.
Reading every changed line is one way to approach this. But if each increase in generated code requires a similar increase in human inspection, review will keep limiting how many changes we can accept. We need a way to decide where that inspection is worth the effort.
My approach is to make evidence a condition of accepting agent-generated code.…