It was never about the code.
It’s a scary time to be a software engineer.
Agentic coding threatens our tenure as the best job in the world. Especially if you define the job as writing code, limited by human bandwidth.
Except it was never about the code.
Code is just the incantation transforming computation into magic. The mechanism to deliver an idea. To experience the impossible.
Unleashed, agents remove the constraints of time and human bandwidth. Creation is now limited only by the cost of compute, not capacity.
This is outcome engineering – o16g.
Beyond engineering the software, o16g is about delivering anything we can imagine and proving the value of the result.
Creation not code.
Cost not time.
Execution not backlog.
O16g will change as often as agents do,
but starts with 16 principles.
The truth of creation.
Code, commits, and shipping are vanity metrics. The only truth is the rate of positive change delivered to the customer. Grade agents on the reality they verify, not the lines they write. Passing tests and nines are irrelevant if the customer experience does not improve. If the outcome is not realized, the work is a failure.
The backlog is a relic of human limitation. Never reject an idea for lack of time, only for lack of budget. If the outcome is worth the tokens, it gets built. Manage to cost, not capacity.
We are architects of reality, not typewriters. Write code only when it brings joy. Delegate the toil. Never let implementation details or unanswered questions block exploration and creation.
Never dispatch an agent into the dark. Map the territory before building. If you don’t know where you stand, you cannot calculate the path to the destination.
Agents explore paths; humans choose the destination. Do not abdicate vision to the machine. Create with mission, goals, and authorial intent. We decide where we are going; the agents get us there.
In an agentic world, code is the cheapest resource. Build to answer questions. Build to test hyoptheses. Build the things you used to buy so you can prove they work perfectly for you. Take every opportunity to get better at knowing you can deliver the outcomes you want.
Vibes are not tests. Agents are probabilistic; success is binary. Predict, measure, and validate every outcome. If you cannot prove it worked, it didn’t.
Opinions are hypotheses; outcomes are data. When an outcome fails, do not simply rollback. Dissect the failure. Understand why the hypothesis was wrong. Debug the decision, not just the code.
The iron price.
Human-in-the-loop is a crutch for weak architecture. Encode laws into the environment. Codify mission, vision, and goals. If the agent cannot parse the intent, it cannot execute the outcome. Ambiguity is the enemy of alignment.
The backlog is dead, but compute is finite. We must always know the next most important task, what would most benefit from compute and attention. We optimize for outcomes. Everything we learn informs our priorities.
Agents cannot reason in a vacuum. Embed context into the infrastructure, not just the prompt. Build the knowledge graph so the agent understands the world before it attempts to change it.
Code is the what; reasoning is the why. Do not accept a black box. Agents must record their discoveries, their rejected paths, and their logic. We pay the compute cost to understand the machine.
Repeating a mistake is a system failure. Spend compute on the post-mortem. Automate the analysis of what went wrong. Inoculate the system so the error never happens again.
Chat is a bottleneck, not an API. Standardize the handoffs between human and machine. Define the protocol for debate, decision, and delivery. Ambiguity in coordination is a system failure.
Speed is dangerous without brakes. Make risk a blocking function. If the risk is unknown or unmitigated, the line stops. Do not hide danger in a report; encode it as a gate.
Trust is a vulnerability. Models drift. Prompts break. Capabilities change overnight. Continuously audit the agent against the domain. Verify the tool is sharp before you use it.
The backlog is dead. The outcome is the only truth.
Welcome to o16g.