TREAT AGENT OUTPUT LIKE COMPILER OUTPUT

Summary from the TLDR Dev newsletter

Discomfort with “lights-out” AI-generated codebases mirrors a question already solved for compilers: nobody reviews compiler output because upstream apparatus (type systems and specs) and downstream apparatus (tests, monitoring, and rollback) made reading the artifact unnecessary. The equivalent doesn't yet exist for coding agents — prompts aren't formal specs, test suites can't catch plausible-but-wrong code at 50x human rate, and AI-checks-AI pipelines are bolt-on rather than first-class CI. Lights-out codebases should be treated as a design target that specifies what verification infrastructure must be built, not an inevitability to brace for.