Today’s continuous deployment processes were hard-won from many lessons learned. Eventually, these practices became formalized, even to the point where the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was understood to require that IT departments formally document their deployment processes.
This kind of governance is what separates professional software development organizations from those that, well, don’t know what they are doing.
Agentic growing pains
Agentic development is headed in this same direction, but it’s all happening a bit more quickly. It was just a few months ago that people began to use AI to write code seriously. At first, most of us were doing it furtively, having Claude Code find and fix bugs, and then quietly checking in the solutions. Maybe we were a bit hesitant to mention that we had done this, but then we felt guilty about doing it and taking credit, and eventually we mentioned it. But it soon became apparent — like “within a week” soon — that Claude Code was up to the task, and we became pretty open about it.
Very quickly, it not only became accepted but actually encouraged, and we were off to the races. In a month, everyone was tokenmaxxing.
