The code runs. The code breaks. The code is what production uses. Specs and docs can help, but they often become stale. So we learned not to trust them too much. Code is honest in a way documents are not. It may be wrong, but it does exactly what it does. But I think there was another reason we trusted code so much. For a long time, code was manual work. We wrote it ourselves. We spent time with it. We were not only typing syntax; we were thinking through the system while writing it. The thinking and the implementation were almost the same activity. That is why code deserved this level of trust. Not because code was perfect. It was not. But because the code carried a lot of the human judgement that produced it. With agentic coding, this becomes more complicated. As an individual contributor, I can move incredibly fast now. I can open Claude Code or a similar tool, give it direction, and shape the project while it is being built.…