Essential Skills in the World of Agentic Coding
A recent lunch with my good friend Prashanth sparked a realization about the rapidly shifting landscape of software engineering. Amidst catching up, he pointed out a looming industry paradox, as AI accelerates our coding speed, the role of Quality Assurance (QA) becomes exponentially more critical, not less. I couldn't agree more. Historically, an average developer might write 500 to 2,000 lines of production-grade code in a month. Today, with AI coding agents developer generate that same volume in a single hour. However, verifying the integrity, security, and true intent of this machine-generated code is the new industry bottleneck. Traditional code reviews can only catch so much. While robust unit, integration, and UI tests are foundational, if LLMs are authoring the core logic and human oversight is lax, an entire system architecture can quickly go sideways. The harsh truth is that every great developer today must first become a great QA engineer. It is no longer just about writ...