The Yegge claim about manual code review being outdated conflates two things: reviewing for correctness vs. reviewing for design coherence. Agents are getting decent at the first (does this function do what the spec says?) but remain weak at the second (does this abstraction fit the existing architecture? will this pattern scale when the next feature lands?).

What actually works for me is treating agents less like autonomous developers and more like very fast typists who need clear architectural guardrails. The heavy lifting is writing the context documents -- architecture decision records, module boundary descriptions, naming conventions -- that constrain the generation. Ironically, the better your documentation, the less you need an orchestrator, because a single agent with good context produces coherent code on the first pass.

The git worktree pattern multiple people mention is underrated. Having each agent work on an isolated branch with automated test gates before merge catches the drift problem at the integration point rather than trying to prevent it during generation.