Delegating to AI Means Governing the Environment

In the previous article , I argued that AI isn't simply changing the tools we use to develop software, but shifting our work to a new level of abstraction. In this one, I want to address the problem that immediately follows: if we're going to write less and less code directly and agents are going to produce an increasingly larger part of it, how the hell do we know whether what they code is actually right? Because the answer obviously can't be “trust the AI, it's very smart”. Even though I personally develop code with AI today with practically no review, I don't blindly trust AI. Just as I don't blindly trust an engineer on my team. I don't even blindly trust myself. Blind trust is a security hole. And not blindly trusting someone doesn't mean distrusting them, it means having mechanisms to prevent their mistakes, or mine, from causing problems. That's why we've spent decades building mechanisms and methodologies around software development to detect, and avoid as much as possible, our mistakes. XP. Scrum. Tests. Code reviews. Pair Programming. CI. Static analysis. Permissions. Observability. Environments. Containers. Auditing... The question, therefore, shouldn't be whether we can trust an AI. The question should be what system do we need to build so we can use it without needing to blindly trust it? It's not deterministic One of the first objections is usually that if you ask it the same thing twice, it generates two different pieces of code. True. But if you give the same task to two different programmers, or to the same programmer with enough time in between, we'll very probably get two different implementations too, depending on the complexity of what we're asking. And if we've never required two developers to produce exactly the same code, why do we expect AI to produce exactly the same code from the same request? Isn't it enough for the result to satisfy the requested requirements? That it does what it's supposed to do. That it passes all kinds of tests. That