Starting to hear of more teams skipping PRs and doing true trunk-based dev. The argument: PRs make less sense in the age of agentic coding. The agent is the author, not me. So I, the prompter, am the first reviewer. One or more AIs operate as second reviewer. Eliminating PRs unlocks radically more throughput - At Amp they do over 100 releases a day.

English is the new programming language. So what’s still worth learning? Vocabulary. Architectures Design patterns Refactoring techniques Security protocols Performance optimizations UI/UX patterns The greater my technical vocabulary, the more precise my prompt.

Excellent agentic coding interview. Key points: Build a “trust ladder”. The more you can constrain the agent’s output, the more you can trust it. Instead of a mere “software factory”, try to create a “Michelin restaurant”. Create processes and tools that make beautiful code automatically. Think about code reviews like sampling. You can’t afford to taste every dish, but you should spot check. Ask “where am I the bottleneck? How can I get the agent to answer its own questions?” Create inner loops and outer loops. Inner loops accomplish tasks. Outer loops coordinate inner loops and analyze the big picture. Your skills should get smaller over time as agents improve.. Focus on workflows, not implementation details. Connectors trigger new work. Connect your bots to Jira, GitHub issues, etc so they begin work automatically. Make it easy for agents to verify their work. Create a CLI for your app and a skill that calls the CLI. Then agents can verify their work consistently and efficiently. A good code base is easy to change.

Problem: I see developers using AI to implement tickets they don't understand. Claude finishes the task and the developer just assumes it's right. They don't understand the ticket well enough to evaluate if AI was successful. Rule: If I don't understand the goal, I shouldn't ask AI to do it.