Programming the Programmer
Notes for a development team that builds with AI agents. Your agent's instructions are code, and nobody is reviewing them.
Every step in computing has been an abstraction over the one before it. We learned to flip a light switch. Then transistors flipped billions of them a second, then machine code told the transistors what to do, then compiled languages wrote the machine code, then scripting languages took the ceremony out of compiling. Language models are the next layer. You describe what you want, and something underneath turns it into code.
That is not cheating, and it is not going away. Linus Torvalds uses these tools on the Linux kernel. Most teams already lean on them for nearly everything, and many developers have not hand-typed a line in a year. The problem is that we still talk about it like a guilty secret. People downplay how much of their work is AI-written, and the team loses the one thing it most needs: an honest comparison of what works.