“The whole existence of AI agents has kind of broken the social contract around code review. It used to be when someone would hand you a feature, it made more sense for you to help get that thing over the line, because they put in a lot of sweat equity. And now all you need is a prompt and a dream, and you can for free create a plausible-looking problem, but it's still hard work to verify that it makes sense.”
Signals and Threads · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026
Minsky and Crepezzi are discussing how coding agents change code review. Users now arrive with finished code instead of feature requests, which makes it socially harder to say no to a change that shouldn't exist.
Transcript
…even though it's not in an ideal shape. But if it's much easier to take those changes and improvements and turn them into a reality, then you can end up with higher quality code that comes out of it. So I do think a lot of what comes out of all this technology depends on what we make out of it.
…know maybe your user wants a thing that you think shouldn't exist but now they're not coming to you with like a request they're coming to you with with code and it feels like a little bit harder socially to be like no we don't want it when the thing they're presenting is kind of a finished product
that's right like there's a way in which the whole like existence of AI agents has kind of broken the social contract around code review where it used to be when someone would hand you a feature like you were you know it made more sense for you to like help get that thing over the line because like they put in a lot of work a lot of sweat equity that went into creating that and now like all you need is like a prompt in a dream and like you can like for free create a plausible looking problem but it's still hard work to verify that it makes sense and like you don't want to like add lots of things to a system that will make it overall like messy and complicated even if the code is good it might be that it makes the system that you're building conceptually complicated for the end user right if everyone gets every knob that they want like you just get too many knobs yep and so yeah figuring out like what's the appropriate kind of pushback right and it's just like the shape of it is different like you've always had to deal with these kind of questions prioritization questions have always been hard but they now just present themselves in different ways and i think it's just something that we have…
yeah i think that's right one framing i've found helpful that i've heard recently is just think of like they are coming to you with code they probably put some time into it think of it as a prototype and then just still have the discussion about whether or not the thing is warranted yeah it's like…
right and the prototypes can be amazing right it can be like someone has an idea of what to do and there's like the prototypes they hand you but the amazing thing is all the prototypes they threw away like they tried a thing and you're like yeah this sucks and they get rid of it it's like you know…
thank you for having me
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