The good king

A good king surrounds himself with capable advisers, ideally people smarter than he is. A bad one keeps people around who tell him what he wants to hear.

With agents, every one of us can now keep a court of any size. The king's problem comes included: whose advice do you follow?

Last week, two of mine disagreed over a chapter.

I'm working on an essay about an eighteenth-century German parish priest and his obsession with bees. An agent is writing one of the explanatory chapters because I can't write it well enough myself. I've spent weeks getting it to produce the factual, fairly dry prose I want. It still wasn't quite there, so I asked a second agent to tear the chapter apart.

The reviewer's verdict: too much passive voice, no actor, the text reads like a technical standard. At first, that made sense to me.

The writer disagreed. Several of those sentences were grammatically active. The supposedly missing actor was right there in the third paragraph.

I passed their responses back and forth. The reviewer had to justify his criticism, the writer his defence. I could follow their disagreement much more easily than I could have spotted the problems myself.

But which criticism helped the essay was still for me to decide. Without a sense of what I wanted the text to do, I'd have followed whichever adviser spoke last.

In software development, my own field, I know the kingdom better. A proposal has to fit an existing system, the people working on it, and the conditions it runs under. Some odd-looking code has a history worth understanding before replacing it.

The advisers will find things we miss. They will also keep finding things long after the work is good enough. We have to judge their objections, spot when an adviser is trying to pull the wool over our eyes, make decisions, and know when to stop.

Agentic coding gives us a court full of capable advisers. We crown ourselves, and there's the guillotine waiting in the market square.