Something that made MVC, dependency injection, and ORMs more palatable is that there is typically a well-structured interface between "our code" and "their code". The current state of agentic dev rarely has AI doing its thing behind some abstraction layer. It's really more like a new coworker that needs to be steered toward team norms very quickly.

I think the main challenge is pressure for more productivity with AI. I often go back and forth about if I am scrutinizing too much (and not being as productive as I could be) or not enough (and shipping slop). Building the additional QA harnesses and feedback loops for agents seems like the best known path forward to accelerate with some safety, but it is still pretty challenging to context-fiy all of the nuanced judgements a seasoned dev team makes.