Agentic Coding Is a Trap

(khalilstemmler.com)

15 points | by MaxMussio 6 hours ago ago

11 comments

  • CodeWriter23 4 hours ago

    To me, this is no different than the c/c++ crowd screaming "But you need to understand types and memory management" to the Type-safe Managed Memory Language crowd.

    Problem solving remains the primary skill. You're just working in a different medium. Instead of code, it's design and specification (which you should have been doing in the first place instead of firing it out on demand as fast as your fingers move and insisting your teammates get in the groove).

    If you're worried that you won't be able to understand why generated code isn't behaving properly, pro tip: Ask mode > ask the LLM to map possible reasons why the code does this when it should be doing that. Your ability to target the 'right' problem area earlier vs later is a matter of experience, as it always has been.

    And you have to spend more time being intentional about setting up context / rules to define your application-specific design patterns.

    For the young-uns, they need to learn their own way to leap frog over the paradigms we were trained on. We should be honest with them and ourselves that those paradigms are obsolete. As is winding core memory by hand. As Musk has said, one day there will be no apps, just a model. We're not there yet but this is the future.

  • DenisM 5 hours ago

    > That's not a character flaw. It's a phase.

    Oh dear. Must we? Half the article is like this.

    • hyperhello 5 hours ago

      AI wrote the whole article. It turns out AI is really good at writing airhead attacks on itself.

  • camgunz 4 hours ago

    I really, really want an "ai" tag.

    • hyperjeff 3 hours ago

      yeah really. half way thru i realized and felt punked. write your own damn articles people.

  • adampunk 5 hours ago

    I’m continually surprised by just how many “AI is ruining X” posts are obviously AI-written. Just not a genre of writing I predicted would appear.

    • conception 4 hours ago

      People seeking engagement as their metric aren’t concerned with the methods to get there.

    • glitchcrab 5 hours ago

      Why though? AI it's just a token predictor, it doesn't care that it is generating text bashing itself.

      • adampunk 3 hours ago

        The AI wouldn’t care obviously but I thought we’d find less maximally ironic engagement bait to be made by machines. I think I didn’t have enough imagination.

  • vb-8448 5 hours ago

    > AI-assisted coding is accelerating skill atrophy for developers who haven't built the foundations yet

    I'd argue that this is true also for seasoned developers.

    One thing I noticed (and annoys me a lot) after almost 1 year of ai-assisted coding on daily basis is that it's incredibly tiring to do the job yourself if the tool doesn't do what you want or how you want.

    • CodeWriter23 4 hours ago

      I think the primary lesson from my high school computer lab instructor holds: "It's doing exactly what you're telling it to do"