Overly verbose codebases are not great for agents in my experience because they confuse them greatly and make refactoring hard. However codebases that I find

Overly verbose codebases are not great for agents in my experience because they confuse them greatly and make refactoring hard. However codebases that I find to work really well with agents are quite lite on abstractions and I always felt that this is the right way to build software for humans too. I have a lot of functions, I pass a lot of data, I embrace a lot of thread local state and this works really well for both humans and AI to understand what is going on. I gave a talk on this recently (not the agentic view), but I found this to work exceptionally well for agents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej5RsTtVvQE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej5RsTtVvQE But here is where agents and humans both agree: quick and easy tooling. Make it easy to iterate on a test, make it easy to manage resources, make the iteration cycle as quick as possible. I'm writing this as my partner's job forces iteration cycles of minutes on her. No agent can do better in that space than a human.