The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s Elevate blog and is being republished here with the author’s permission.

For much of human history, we’ve evaluated code quality via code review: Someone reads what you wrote and makes sure it’s clean, thoughtful, fast, understandable, and tests well. For agents, that approach doesn’t scale well; there’s just too much code for anyone to read. As a result, more and more of our quality checks have to happen in the harness, environment, and operating system around the agent. I still read and review code, but am very intentional about where I am comfortable with constraints as the check.

Software quality now depends on the constraints you set around your agents.

Speaking of quality, agents are writing your code. Sonar gives you the quality gates to make it shippable. I had a coding agent build a slick app, then asked an agent to review it—twice. The reviews disagreed, and a re-run gave a third answer. You can’t gate a merge on a coin flip.…