No pain, no trust

Agents don&rsquo;t feel pain. Humans do. This insight, pointed out by Mario Zechner , turns out to be quite profound. Pain in a codebase is a signal. It&rsquo;s a feeling that senior developers have spent decades calibrating to say &ldquo;no, we don&rsquo;t need that&rdquo;. It&rsquo;s the thing that triggers a large refactor even though it will not add any new features to the next release. Pain…