It is Q2 of 2026 and agentic coding is so thoroughly ingrained in our daily development process that life without it has started to become unimaginable. Don’t we all sometimes wonder: How did people travel to another country before translation or navigation apps? How did people survive without emails and smartphones? Pretty soon it’s going to be: how did people write code before AI agents?
If like my team, you are using agentic coding responsibly in a serious production project, you might have noticed another change - the code repo has markedly improved.
Wait, what? Aren’t there like ten posts every day on Reddit bemoaning about how vibe coding has left unmanageable mess? That every project jumping on the AI bandwagon is in for a reckoning six months from now?
Well, perhaps.
But this reputation of AI hallucinating and making expensive mistakes has ironically helped our codebase get better. Developers are being extra careful to prevent any ambiguities.
Some observations from my team:
- Detailed documentation is being created explaining all the context that’s not captured in raw code, because the AI agent needs to read it.
- Well-structured code, unit tests, and good variable names are being prioritized, because AI needs to understand it.
- Error messages are being improved, because the LLM needs to interpret them.
- Explicit coding conventions and style guides are being written, because AI should follow established patterns. There are no unwritten rules anymore. Or else, how is AI supposed to know them?
- No more knowledge hoarding! Every team has that one engineer who possesses arcane knowledge about the project or the architecture, simply by virtue of being on the team for 5 years. But if you want the AI agent to help, you’ve got to document what you know.
In my experience, the kind of mistakes AI agents make is not very different from what humans can make under certain circumstances. All of the due diligence I mentioned above could have been done all along, so that it would be easier for any new joiner to get onboarded. But it’s interesting to see developers being so conscientious when it comes to AI.
There’s another aspect to this. When a new developer joins the team, it’s expected that they will take some time to get used to our way of working. People are accommodating to newbie mistakes.
But there is very little patience for AI making the same mistakes that a human can make. Despite AI agents being as impressive as they are, any error committed by them leads to profound disappointment.
This has had an interesting side effect: we’re now doing for AI what we should have been doing for humans all along.
This is what separates responsible agentic coding from the vibe-coded mess that internet warns about. These improvements don’t just help AI work more safely, they make the entire development process, human or agentic, more systematic and maintainable. Perhaps they will help us avoid being a vibecoding cautionary tale.