The recent shift toward autonomous coding agents — demonstrated by systems like Devin taking over nearly 90% of internal code commits at Cognition — marks a permanent pivot in software production. Engineering teams are celebrating 10x throughput metrics, but they're stepping directly into velocity entropy.
When code generation drops to zero marginal cost, code ceases to be a craft that reflects human labor or architectural history. It becomes what Roland Barthes called plastic — an alchemical material that is endlessly malleable and instantly produced, but completely stripped of origin.
A "plastic codebase" arrives without the physical resistance of human design. Because it costs nothing to generate, it carries zero institutional weight. The danger for B2B engineering leads is not that these autonomous tools fail to write working functions; the danger is that they flood the system with un-auditable abstractions. When velocity is decoupled from human comprehension, system architecture doesn't scale, it decays under the weight of artificial output.