This framing...
> Otherwise you can end up with persuasive agreement rather than real verification.
... is very familiar and one of the inspirational elements that led to https://github.com/spencermarx/open-code-review/tree/main (not trying to shamelessly plug, just your articulation was right on the money).
It's definitely the holistic set of static analysis and a robust automated test pyramid, then agentic analysis (ideally differentiated, and redundant with discourse -- like Open Code Review), that is proving to be effective at ensuring quality code.
That said, and a bit of a premature callout to the other project I mentioned, I think structured knowledge graphs to describe and commit to software intent (beyond what nested AGENT/CLAUDE/rule files and free form docs give you) are going to help us do a better job of engineering context and prompts for agentic development. This is the area that still feels like the wild west. Standardization is helping, and I think the toolset available now between RAG, lifecycle hooks, progressive disclosure in context and prompts, plus multi-agent implementation, review and discourse will help to close the loop and get us to the point of really confident and consistent pure AI-driven development. That's just my POV lol, I'll hop off my soap box now haha