i spoke to a founder yesterday - their CTO finally read their agent-made codebase after months and panicked when he realized it was impossible to understand wtf was going on
my rule of thumb is: if your codebase starts written by agents, don’t try to understand it
instead, align at the architectural level before any building happens, and ask the agent to maintain a living architecture diagram of how the system works
there are three altitudes that matter:
- Top-level: architecture
- Mid-level: patterns & abstractions
- Low-level: file-level code
in today’s world, a CTO should be deeply concerned with #1. #2 matters too, but not as critical as #1.
if #1 and #2 are dialed in, #3 is where most of the high leverage agentic gains live.
as long as you understand the architecture and critical interfaces, it becomes much easier to reason about ground truth and meaningfully iterate
understanding and informing the architecture / patterns / abstractions give your codebase maximum longevity and agent maintainability