AI Coding Agents Have Created a New Problem: The Validation Bottleneck

The hard part of software engineering has never been writing the code. It is defining the problem, exploring the solution space, planning an approach, and validating that the result actually works in a real system. Writing code is the mechanical middle step. Coding agents have made that middle step largely autonomous, which should free engineers to spend more time on the high-value work on either side of it. And in some ways, it has. Agents accelerate exploration. They let developers prototype faster, try more approaches, and iterate on designs that would have taken days to stub out manually. But by increasing the speed of code generation, agents have also increased the volume of changes that need to be verified. Validation is not the high-value part of software engineering, but it is increasingly eating up more developer time than the exploration and problem-solving it was supposed to unlock.