Exotic Agentic Development Strategies: Everything old is new again

For 40 years we knew how to write software correctly. We just couldn't afford to. Now we can.. We all know you can vibe out some slop on a grammatically incorrect, partial coherent, stream of consciousness. The question is: how do we use AI to develop code at a higher quality level? How do we utilize Ai to write code better than we could. Not more, but better. With the advent of cheaper coding, we should take a look back at previous failed methods of doing software engineering when coding was difficult. Many past practices did not become popular because the cost to benefit was much too high. With that balance changing, we have a treasure trove of ideas and techniques to improve agentic development. In this talk, explore multiple techniques and how to apply them to a agent/harness. We will investigate design, review and verification ideas that have the proven ability to reduce bugs by 90%, improve reliability to a mathematical certainty and implement not only a coherent design, but one that meets all non-functional constraints. Techniques used by JPL and NASA for maximal system reliability. Ideas promoted by Knuth and Meyers in the 1980's and 1990's that are fantastic from a theoretical perspective. Model driven development, property based testing, and other techniques that are now trivial with AI. Everything old is new again, but now affordable.