When I started building what became Scarab Diagnostic Suite, I was not trying to create a theory of AI-assisted software development.
I was trying to survive my own repo.
I was building an intricate frontend/backend system with Codex. Not a toy app. Not a landing page. A real system with a public site, internal content architecture, member-facing surfaces, product logic, backend APIs, frontend routes, editorial workflows, operational concerns, and a lot of moving parts that all needed to keep agreeing with each other.
Codex could move fast. Very fast.
It could generate files, wire components together, write migrations, patch errors, build routes, add tests, explain itself, and keep pushing the project forward. In the beginning, that felt like the whole promise of AI coding agents.
