Agentic Code Quality
O'Reilly Radar, Thursday, October 15th, 2026
Addy Osmani argues code quality for agent-written code must move from human review into harness constraints.
Republished from Addy Osmani's Elevate blog, the piece notes that reading every change does not scale when agents produce huge volumes of code, so quality checks increasingly have to live in the harness, environment and operating system around the agent.
Osmani calls these constraints quality gates: unit tests, property tests, acceptance tests and other deterministic checks applied to agent proposals.
He still reviews code but is deliberate about where he relies on constraints instead.
His aim is to build loops that can deliver production software reliably at high change volume.