Beyond Human-Readable: Rethinking Software Engineering Conventions for the Agentic Development Era
For six decades, software engineering principles have been optimized for a single consumer: the human developer. The rise of agentic AI development, where LLM-based agents autonomously read, write, navigate, and debug codebases, introduces a new primary consumer with fundamentally different constraints. This paper presents a systematic analysis of human-centric conventions under agentic pressure and proposes a key design principle: semantic density optimization, eliminating tokens that carry zero information while preserving tokens that carry high semantic value. We validate this principle through a controlled experiment on log format token economy across four conditions (human-readable, ...
| Authors | Dmytro Ustynov |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 8 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 April 2026 |
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