We've all worked with a rockstar developer. They joined the team years ago, full of energy. They had great ideas about new tech, new paradigms, new architectures. Their cutting-edge ideas left everyone else feeling a bit behind and outdated.
What carries over from the old rockstar is that they produced faster than anyone else could follow, and whoever inherited the code paid for it later. An agent does the same without the ego. It’ll turn out a week of plausible-looking code in an afternoon, and the slow part becomes reading and understanding it rather than writing it. What’s worked for us is making the agent meet the standards before the code lands, a linter and a couple of runnable checks in the way, rather than trusting a reviewer to catch every miss when they’re forty files deep and tired.
What carries over from the old rockstar is that they produced faster than anyone else could follow, and whoever inherited the code paid for it later. An agent does the same without the ego. It’ll turn out a week of plausible-looking code in an afternoon, and the slow part becomes reading and understanding it rather than writing it. What’s worked for us is making the agent meet the standards before the code lands, a linter and a couple of runnable checks in the way, rather than trusting a reviewer to catch every miss when they’re forty files deep and tired.