# The Future of Software Development: Embracing AI and Quality

> Software engineering veteran Chris Sells on AI coding agents, redefining software quality, and building software factories, on Very Good Engineering.

- Source: https://verygood.ventures/podcasts/chris-sells-ai-and-software-quality/
- Published: 2026-07-22
- Speakers: Chris Sells
- Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWh9TCSFdZw

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Host Jorge Coca sits down with Chris Sells, CEO of Gas City and a software engineering veteran whose career spans Intel, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Sourcegraph. At Google he spent three years on the Flutter team, helping carry it from version 1.0 to 3.0. The conversation opens with what Chris sees as the one thing AI hasn't changed: we still have software-shaped problems that demand genuinely high-quality solutions. What has changed is that agents, not humans, now write and sometimes even read the code.

Chris draws a firm line between vibe coding, where you ask for something and get code that runs, and production software that has to hold up under load, meet latency targets, and slot cleanly into an existing enterprise system. Because agents can't sense a code smell, he argues engineering standards like DRY and SOLID have to be written down explicitly rather than left in engineers' heads. That thinking drives Gas City, his open source platform that orchestrates teams of AI agents into what he calls software factories, using primitives like Beads, formulas, and rigs. Gas City runs on Gas City, with roughly a hundred agents working around the clock across 23 repositories.

He and Jorge also dig into where humans still matter: setting intent rather than syntax, and bringing the taste and agenda that agents lack. Chris shares how his small team uses named agentic teammates to help run the company, why he thinks software factories go mainstream within a couple of years, and the one Flutter package he wishes existed, AI-generated dynamic UI.