I think you misunderstood what the phrase actually means. You can only successfully manage or outsource a process once you understand it well enough to explain it. Therefore, most of the people doing agentic engineering are not following this Perlisim.
Oh, that's exactly what I meant, except its corollary. People who do understand how software works should absolutely be having agents code it. And we do.
> People who do understand how software works should absolutely be having agents code it.
I don’t think there’s such people.
Either you’re writing a software for the first time and so the premise is not true. Or you’re writing it a second time and what would be the point? Just reuse the code you already have.
Maybe we need a definition of “understanding how software works”. There’s the technical aspect (computation theory, computer organization, compilation, executable format, …) and there’s the necessity aspect (the domain).
The technical aspect can be learned although you can stop at the top of the abstraction tower (the programming language and its ecosystem). The domain aspect encompasses the whole world pretty much. Contributing to Blender does not qualify you to review a Krita patch. You have to learn the latter’s code first.
