The Compiler Is the Cheapest Eval You'll Ever Run
Teams building with coding agents are spending real money on verification. Eval suites that replay curated tasks against every model upgrade. LLM judges that grade diffs. Sandboxed test runs that burn minutes of compute per iteration. All of it exists to answer one question: did the model write code that works?
Meanwhile, the cheapest eval most of these teams will ever have access to is sitting in their toolchain, and they configured it a decade ago without thinking about models at all. It's the compiler. A strict type checker is a free, instant, deterministic verifier that runs inside the agent loop on every single edit — and whether you have one is decided by your language choice, not your eval budget.
That reframing has an uncomfortable consequence. The stack decisions your team settled years ago — dynamic language for velocity, types optional, tests as the safety net — were optimized for human authors. When the author is a model, the tradeoffs reorder. The language your team is fastest in may no longer be the language your agents are safest in.
