alt Hacker News> I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol.
You didn’t find that to be a little too much unfamiliarity? With the couple of projects that I’ve worked on that were developed using an “agent first” approach I found that if I added too many new things at once it would put me in a difficult space where I didn’t feel confident enough to evaluate what the agent was doing, and when it seemed to go off the rails I would have to do a bunch of research to figure out how to steer it.
Now, none of that was bad, because I learned a lot, and I think it is a great way to familiarize oneself with a new stack, but if I want to move really fast, I still pick mostly familiar stuff.
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I'm assuming this is the case where they are working in an existing codebase written by other humans. I've been in this situation a lot recently, and Copilot is a pretty big help to figure out particularly fiddly bits of syntax - but it's also really stupid suggests a lot of stuff that doesn't work at all.
> I didn’t feel confident enough to evaluate what the agent was doing
So don't. It is vibe coding, not math class. As long as it looks like it works then all good.
SwiftKotlinDartGo blur together by now. That's too many languages but what are you gonna do?
I was ready to find that it was a bit much. The conjunction of ATProto and Dart was almost too much for the coding agent to handle and stay useful. But in the end it was OK.
I went from "wow that flutter code looks weird" to enjoying it pretty quickly.