Speed limits, GenAI coding agents and Autobahns - part 2: raising the safe speed

Part 1 developed a driving metaphor for GenAI-based development: you are the driver, the coding agent and its harness are the car, and your code and delivery system are the road. And in the same way that the road determines how fast you can drive, the characteristics of the code and the socio-technical architecture around it determine how fast you should let the agent generate code, and how much cognitive debt, if any, is acceptable.

Part 1 also covered the first of the three ways of working with a coding agent: understand the road - what condition the code and the socio-technical architecture around it are in - which tells you the safe speed. This article describes two ways to raise the speed limit. First, you can improve the road: the architecture, the tests, the guardrails and the deployment pipeline. Second, you can improve the car: the model, the prompts, the tools and the workflow that make up the harness.…