Software Engineering fundamentals matter more than ever
Joseph Heck develops with agentic harnesses, leaning heavily on the prompt "develop with red/green TDD", and calls the combination of harness and models "a really interesting power tool". The essay is about where that tool stops. With some foresight it gets you to "it works" and "it's testable", but making software debuggable, maintainable, layered and composable is "still quite a trick": quite a lot of that work takes extensive, thoughtful reasoning, which is where, in Heck's view, today's models fall short. Heck hopes for near-term advances in how models are trained, and calls carefully reviewing, planning and fixing the seams of software a critical skill "with or without agentic assistants", now "more important than ever".
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