Your codebase has now become infrastructure and as such you have to design it in a way so that it is also legible for the agent and it can make the most of it.
Cristina Poncela Cubeiro
— The Friction is Your Judgment — Earendil Watch on YouTube
Days ago a colleague and friend shared this video with me. In it, Armin Ronacher — the creator of Flask, someone I highly respect after having used Flask for many years — and his colleague Cristina describe a framework for working with agentic coding that reframed things for me.
We as developers are not building tools for ourselves to ease our dev process anymore. We're building the infrastructure — the guidelines, the rails, the boundaries — for the agents that will act on our behalf. That's the shift. The codebase isn't just something you read and the machine executes. It's now the environment where a third actor lives and operates.
We've put down the hammer and the pickaxe. Now we have to wear the white hat. The architect's hat. We're at a meta-level: designing the space, setting the constraints, making the structure legible — not just for humans, but for the agents navigating it autonomously.