You can’t keep humans from making those errors either but you also don’t let an error prone human crank out 20k LOC per day without forcing other humans to understand it.
C# Roslyn Analyzers[0], for example, are quite powerful and can identify complex patterns in code. One approach to deterministic enforcement would be to ensure that the project is set up with an analyzers library and mistakes that can be deterministically flagged are
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/code-quality/...
Each of these are just layers of control at different lifecycles of agent code generation. Analyzers are nice because it gives targeted, static analysis that can prevent certain classes of errors very early and at lower iterative cost (e.g. a build)
“You can’t deterministically keep them from making even a tiny fraction of all the possible errors they can and do make though.”
And you replied
“This may be platform dependent.”
I’m unsure how else to read that other than an implication that this might be possible on some platforms.
I've been using languages with stronger type systems and that's also a huge boon.
Why would that be the case? You can run human written code through the same “linters, compilers, static analysis, fuzzing, testing” as you do agent produced code.
Agents can also do all of those things, but they are generally more compliant to instruction.
Agents require far stricter guardrails than humans. Without linters, tests, static analysis, oracles etc… no agent can create a large program.
Even if you’re correct, you just build those checks into CI so that neither humans nor agents can skip them.