We ran a retro after one of the first projects we shipped on our new agent framework, and a teammate brought up something I haven't stopped thinking about since. The risk with coding agents that worries them isn't bad code — it's shipping a change you never built a mental model of. The agent writes it, it passes, it looks right, you move on, without ever forming the understanding you'd have ended up with if you'd written it by hand.

The cost is just deferred. It shows up later, when something breaks and the person who "owns" the code has nothing in their head to debug from, or in review when you're nodding along to a diff you can't actually evaluate. Writing code yourself forces a model whether you want one or not. An agent quietly removes that forcing function, and nothing replaces it unless you go looking.

This isn't new as a concept — we've always been able to paste something we didn't understand or lean on someone more experienced. What's different is that agents make it the path of least resistance, all day, at the scale of your whole output. Mostly I've started treating "can I explain why this change is correct" as the bar before I ship, instead of "did it pass," and treating review as the place to rebuild the model rather than rubber-stamp the agent's. But I don't think anyone has this figured out yet — it feels like one we'll all work out by trial and error, as an industry, over the next while.

I've been deleting a lot of code lately and I cannot tell you how good it feels. I cleared out about 400 stale translation keys — the kind that accumulate over years and that nobody dares touch, because who still knows what references them? The agent knows; it checks every reference in seconds, so the sweep I'd always filed under "someday" turned into an afternoon. And Eugene and Jeff finally pulled out Bootstrap (BOOTSTRAP! the framework we've been trying to get rid of for years!) — thank you both, truly. I re-ran our UI library market share report afterward and that's when the impact really landed: Bootstrap is finally gone.

What surprised me is how the agents change the math. Migrating class components to function components with hooks, ripping out an old framework, pruning dead i18n — these were always "we should do this eventually" jobs that lost every prioritization fight. The cost of removing code and cleaning up our codebases dropped enough that now we just... do it. I keep catching myself opening diffs hoping they're mostly red.

My ideas used to end up as markdown notes in a folder, which is a polite way of saying they ended up nowhere. Filing a real ticket is more effort than I want to spend in the ten seconds I actually have the idea.

Now I say /new-idea and describe it in a sentence. It interviews me — what's the problem, what does done look like, what's explicitly out of scope — and it stops as soon as the ticket is unambiguous, then files it under my epic and assigns it to me.

At the same time, another session — [on a stable worktree, remember?](https://fab.mabl.com/posts/2026-05-06-dario-i-had-20-worktrees-and-no) — is running /idea-loop. It picks the oldest idea up, moves it to in progress, and we build it: plan, tests, review, PR. From there the ticket walks its own states, and a morning check only marks it shipped once a production tag actually contains the commit.

A PR landed on our CLI with ~550 lines of new probe code. Its entire product effect was one debug log line, and the number it existed to measure was one the PR's own limitations section admitted it couldn't measure. My six-lens /deep-review panel read it and did good work: safer, quieter, better named. Not one of the six asked whether it should ship at all.

The reviewers weren't the problem. Every mechanism in that panel is anchored — a finding needs a file:line, a fix needs a before/after. "This file shouldn't exist" has no anchor, so there's nowhere to file it, so nobody says it. Each lens does the one thing the harness makes easy: improve the code in front of it.

So every lens now returns a scope verdict — ship-as-is, split, or cut — and that gets settled before any fix is applied. Order matters: hardening code that's about to be deleted makes the deletion look expensive. And a cut doesn't authorize anything. The panel rules; I still press delete.

For years the pundits said "data is the new oil," so we hoarded it: API logs, cluster utilization, billing exports, error traces — all in hope that one day we'd have time to actually make use of it. That day is here, and it belongs to the agents. Want to optimize application opex? You could clear your calendar, check into a remote alpine retreat, and spend a week reading the code, the 27-page cloud vendor pricing page, and the 7 pages of "limits" and gotchas — then build a massive spreadsheet crossing all of that with your usage data. But that smells like 2024 thinking. It's 2026: wire up the proper MCP servers and ACLs, offer your agent the code, docs, and data with precise marching orders, and go to bed. Do your vendor's billing docs include set theory notation and lots of linear algebra? Perfect — agents love math. In the morning, review the LLM's citations, pat yourself on the back for saving the operation a few hundred grand — all while you slept.

You're no longer limited by what you know how to do with your data lake, but simply by your own initiative and imagination. LFG.

823 PRs merged across our repos this month. Same 28 days last year: 218. Same number of people.

Everyone got faster once we leaned into the AI tooling, and the review queue got the bill. I stopped being able to keep up with mine, and I don't think I was alone. Writing the code wasn't the slow part anymore. Reviewing it was.

What made review slow wasn't the hard parts, it was getting to them. Most of a big diff is a rename, a function moved between files, a regenerated snapshot. The two hunks that decide whether this ships are buried in the middle of it.

So I wrote /review-with-me. It tells me what the change is for and why, picks the hunks carrying real risk, walks me through them one at a time, and turns whatever I say into inline comments on the PR.