Code is clay now

Alberto Denia's metaphor: before agentic coding, changing code was like carving stone, so large changes needed demolition, scaffolding and careful upfront plans. Now changes are cheap, and code behaves like clay you can rough out, test, reshape or discard, then refine from overall mass down to detail. He describes two ends of a spectrum. The artisan stays in the loop and judges every iteration, which can compress product, engineering and QA into one person and half an hour; judging the code as well as the surface is what separates this from vibe coding. The factory takes the human out of the loop with specs, generators and verifiers, and suits well-structured codebases with repeatable patterns. In both, human judgment still steers: at every step for the artisan, upfront in the pipeline for the factory. We find the framing useful: taste, context, guardrails and architecture (his armature and kiln) are where the human effort belongs now.