Something I haven’t been doing well on my agentic coding projects is close code review. I’m not quite YOLO vibe coding as I do look at the code typically. But I don’t go over it with a fine-tooth comb applying proper software-development practices.
And I really need to do a better job making sure the tests don’t suck.
On a recent episode of Hugo Bowne-Anderson’s excellent Vanishing Gradients podcast, Wes McKinney confirmed a practice that’s been on my TODO list to put in place: “adversarial code review”
And so what I discovered almost haphazardly, which is the solution to the problem, is that you need to have your agents adversarially reviewed. Like all of their output needs to be reviewed adversarially, ideally by other models. So not having Claude review Claude’s output. have Codex and Gemini review Claude’s output. So every time my Claude code sessions do anything,they commit and the commit is immediately reviewed by either Codex or Gemini or both. And I feed that output back into my cloud code session. Be like, I see what you did there, but you’re not getting this past me. You’re going to fix all these bugs. And so I’m not reading the code anymore,but the code is being read aggressively by a lot of agents. And by the time I’m putting up a pull request on GitHub now, on RoboRev, for example, like my code review system, Typically, there’s been 20 or 30 review passes that have taken place if it’s a complex feature
Apologies for the wall of text on that quote. It was taken directly from the podcast transcript.
McKinney also had a spicy take on Python usage:
It’s the agent writing the code. And it’s the development loop of writing the code, building testing, write the code, build test and iterating. And so I do think we’ll see for many types of software, a shift away from Python towards other programming languages. I think Go is probably the best language for those like other types of software projects. And like I said, I haven’t written a line of Go code in my life.
Now Bowne-Anderson is engaging in a bit of selective, promotional quoting. In full context, McKinney asserted that there will be an order-of-magnitude more software written and a lot of agents writing that code. Similar to my language observation on some Matthew Rocklin content, statically typed languages help agents succeed. To me, this doesn’t mean less Python because of Go/Rust/TypeScript. It means more code overall: Python created by humans, augmented by Go/Rust/TypeScript from agents.
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