Orchestration of agentic coding

Opus 4.5, in whatever harness (I prefer claude code), broke through a barrier; the ability to complete features in large codebases to a satisfying degree. The new reality is starting to set in (remember the future is unevenly distributed), and all technologists should invest in learning and exploring this space, lest they be left behind. Gas Town for example, represents one of the first steps I’ve seen towards realizing the evolution of software development. Take half an hour and read through the post, in entertainment value alone it is worth the read.

The current crop of models cannot be trusted to the level that a truly hands-off, eyes-shut, “just do it” development method seems to promise. But you can trust a highly skilled human to be able to massage outputs from a horde of agents into useful, readable and - most importantly - working code. Gas Town is likely to be the first of many agent-orchestration-based workflows, and they will all be based on decades of learned software engineering principles. If you’ve ever worked on highly distributed and international teams, you know it’s possible to “trust, but verify” your way to working high-value software. Why can’t we do the same with agents? Remember, they are only going to get smarter, but humans are also smart and we still verify their work. Assume you have an agent that is maximally intelligent, has an infinite context window and scores 100% on all benchmarks. Would you trust everything it wrote? No, you will always have to verify, only mathematically sound functions guarantee correctness. Intelligence is probabilistic, math is deterministic. Code reviews, tests, vertical slices, iterative development, sprints, milestones, all tricks of the trade in order to achieve one goal; good software.

The future of software engineering is being planned and executed now. Take the time to view the new way through the lens of the old, I think you’ll find the problems, and therefore solutions, will be similar. Being ahead of the curve in this case, means looking back.