Turning the Lights Back On

In early 2025, the software industry chased the dream of the "lights off" software factory, where code was considered free and human review was dismissed as a bottleneck. Engineering teams raced to "token max," building automated loops where AI agents built, tested, and shipped changes in minutes without any human oversight.

In July 2025, the team at HumanLayer went "full lights off," intentionally stopping all code reviews. While the speed was initially intoxicating, the codebase rapidly decayed into "slop". Because AI models are trained primarily to pass tests rather than maintain quality, they created architectural messes and "shotgun surgery" code, where a single change caused unexpected breakages across the system. The dream collapsed when a critical failure crashed their site, leaving users furious and engineers struggling to navigate a shambolic codebase they no longer understood.

Realizing that automated harnesses were not enough to solve what was fundamentally a model training issue, the industry began "turning the lights back on". HumanLayer transitioned to a new era of agentic engineering, reintroducing human oversight through upfront product reviews, architecture, and program design. They found that just 30 minutes of pre-planning saved hours of review time later. By aligning on the logic before a single line was written, they could leverage AI for the heavy lifting of coding while ensuring that humans still owned the code and the long-term health of the system.

source: https://youtu.be/Ib5GBkD555M?si=BO6a-ryWTm2VGuNx