Speed limits, GenAI coding agents and Autobahns - part 1: how fast should you go?

GenAI coding agents enable a team to generate code rapidly. However, each team member is powered by a 20 W organic processing substrate, and there’s a limit to the rate at which they can read and understand code. As a result, the team cannot keep up, creating a serious problem: cognitive debt. Code gets committed and deployed that nobody understands. The gap between what the system does and what the team knows it does keeps widening.

But it does not have to be this way. Just because an agent can generate code faster than a team can understand it doesn’t mean a team should let it. The question every team should be asking is:

How fast should we let the agent go on our code?

My sense, however, is that not enough teams are asking this question.…