Code is clay now
A useful frame for how agentic coding changes engineering practice: human judgment remains essential, but can be applied continuously in an artisan loop or embedded upstream in a factory pipeline.
Agentic coding has made code dramatically cheaper to reshape. Denia’s metaphor is that code is now clay rather than stone: build a rough version, see how it behaves, and reshape it before investing in polish. That makes trying a real product direction more practical than relying on plans and mockups alone.
The change does not remove engineering judgment. It changes where and when that judgment is applied. The artisan stays in the loop, reviewing each iteration and refining work through fast feedback. The factory moves more judgment upstream into specs, generators, tests, evals, and guardrails, escalating to a human when the system cannot verify its own work.
These are complementary modes, not rival ideologies. Use the artisan loop for novel problems and features that need to feel right; use factory workflows for repeatable work with clear patterns and acceptance criteria. The engineering challenge is choosing the right balance, and building the structure that keeps malleable code from collapsing into an unmaintainable pile.