The easiest mistake in engineering is assuming the person before you should have known better. A strange workaround, an awkward abstraction, a manual deploy step: sometimes the work really is careless, but a lot of the time it is context you do not have. Before criticizing a design, walk a mile in the author's context, then fix what is still broken.
Every serious conversation about AI agents is really a conversation about trust, and trust is not believing the agent will get it right. It is knowing what happens when it gets something wrong. Undo is not a button, it is an operational discipline: design, validation, controlled execution, reversal, compensation, and learning. The more we let agents act instead of advise, the more that discipline has to exist before we hand them the keys.
Working yourself out of a job does not mean making yourself useless. It means removing the broken, fragile, one-person-dependent parts of your work so the system no longer needs babysitting. The best engineers do not protect a little kingdom of broken things. They make the kingdom unnecessary, and earn their way into bigger problems.
Boring software is not dull to build, it is uneventful to operate. The thing you ship can be clever and satisfying, but running it in production should be routine: practiced rollbacks, clear ownership, and no reliance on heroics. That kind of boring is engineered, not accidental.
Notes on what happens to software after it ships: ownership, deployment, operations, and the human layer underneath. Most architecture problems are really ownership problems.
