But, have you any code that has been vetted and verified to see if this approach works? This whole Agentic code quality claim is an assertion, but where is the literal proof?

Funnily enough I've literally never seen anyone demo this, despite all the other AI hype. It's the one thing that convinces me they're still behind.

Just today I had an agent add a fourth "special case" to a codebase, and I went back and DRY'd three of them.

Now I used the agent to do a lot of the grunt work in that refactor, but it was still a design decision initiated by me. The chatbot, left unattended, would not have seen that needed to be done. (And when, during my refactor, it tried to fold in the fourth case I had to stop it.)

(And for a lot of code, that's ok - my static site generator is an unholy mess at this point, and I don't much care. But for paid work...)

It’s agents all the way down - until you have liability. At some point, it’s going to be someone’s neck on the line, and saying “the agents know” isn’t going to satisfy customers (or in a worst case, courts).