The Code Is Lying

Description

Welcome to the Leanpub Launch video for The Code Is Lying: Engineering with Coding Agents https://leanpub.com/thecodeislying by Alen Joy! 0:00 Alen Joy introduces himself and the origins of the book 0:45 The real problem with AI-generated code: code that works but nobody understands 1:33 How understanding used to be bundled with the act of building software 2:24 Teams with high throughput and flat incidents but a dangerous understanding gap 3:10 Why the book uses a fictional company and narrative case-study format 3:58 Why a list-of-guidelines structure was abandoned in favour of storytelling 5:35 Drift as the real failure mode: how review standards erode without any single decision 6:25 The unanswered question: what happens to junior engineers who never build judgment the hard way 8:01 Two core arguments: understanding now needs its own budget, and accountability cannot be delegated to a tool 8:48 Who the book is for and why it avoids tools, tutorials, and vendor chapters About the Book When code gets cheap, understanding becomes expensive. AI can turn a description into working software in minutes. That does not make the surrounding engineering problems disappear. It moves them. When generation stops being the bottleneck, the scarce work is everything that was always harder to automate: stating intent precisely, supplying context, reviewing what came back, verifying that it is safe, integrating it, and deciding when an answer should not be trusted. The Code Is Lying follows a team of engineers at a company called Meridian through that shift. It opens with a ticket an agent closes in our minutes and a pull request nobody really read. It moves through a requirement that quietly became code, an eval suite that kept reporting green while the team's understanding of the system got thinner, a security review triggered by what an agent was allowed to do, a production incident, an audit, and the second year of working this way, once the novelty is gone and the practice has to actually hold. The argument is simple: generation is not the same thing as understanding. A faster way to produce code does not remove the need to know what the code means, how the system behaves, or when to stop. This is a practical book. Each chapter ends with field notes: the specific habits, checks, and team rules the engineers adopt in response to what went wrong. Specify purpose completely and leave the solution open. Treat verification as part of the product rather than overhead around it. Keep changes small, because a smaller diff is one a human can still understand. Remember that a green build is evidence, not proof, and that accountability does not transfer to a tool. Treat every increase in what an agent can read, write, run, or deploy as a security decision. It is written for the people who have to live with the output: engineers, tech leads, architects, and engineering managers who are already using coding agents and want the practice around them to be better than "add more automation." The goal is not less automation. It is better engineering around automation. About the Author Alen Joy is a Technical Architect with more than thirteen years of experience designing and building scalable enterprise systems. His work spans cloud-native platforms, distributed systems, and AI-powered engineering solutions across Azure and .NET. More recently, his focus has shifted toward Agentic AI and the design of engineering systems where automation operates within clear guardrails, while human judgement remains part of the loop. His approach to architecture is grounded in a practical question: how do you turn messy real-world constraints into decisions that hold up in production? That perspective shapes both his engineering work and his writing. He writes about architecture decisions, trade-offs, and practical patterns for building systems with AI, .NET, and distributed infrastructure. Follow the author here! https://x.com/alenjoy333 Thank you for watching, please like and leave a comment, we'd love to hear from you! Please Subscribe and Follow! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/leanpub X: https://x.com/leanpub Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leanpub Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leanpub Create Your Own Leanpub Book! You can create your own book anytime here: https://leanpub.com/create/book Here's the tutorial showing how to write and publish a Leanpub book in your browser (it's free!): https://help.leanpub.com/en/articles/2932527-getting-started-writing-a-book-in-leanpub-s-web-browser-writing-mode If you're a Leanpub author and you'd like to submit your own Launch video for us to publish, or if you'd like to record a Launch video with Len, please go here: https://leanpub.com/launch. #books #leanpublishing #selfpublishing #leanpub #writing #ai #softwarearchitecture #CodingAgents #AIEngineering #AgenticAI #SoftwareArchitecture #CodeReview