On HN I think you overestimate the number of optimists that are optimists because they have some vested interest. Everyone everywhere arguably has a vested interest. I would also argue all of the folks on HN that are hostile and dismissive of coding agents also have a vested interest (just for the sake of contrasting your argument). If coding agents were really crappy I wouldn’t be using them just like I didn’t use them until end of 2025.

What conversation is hard to have? If you mean trying to convince people coding agents can or cannot do a specific thing then that may never go away. If you take an overall theme or capability, in some cases it will “just work” and in other cases it needs some serious steering or scaffolding, and in other cases it will just waste as much time as you will let it. It’s an imperfect tool and it may always be, and two people insisting it can do something and it cannot do that same thing may both be right.

What is troubling to me is the attitude of folks that are heavily hostile towards these models and the people that use them. People routinely conflate market promises and actual delivered tools and capabilities and lump people who enjoy and get lots of mileage out of these tools into what appears to be a big strawman camp of fawning fans who don’t understand or appreciate Real Software Engineering; people who would write bad code anyway and not know. It’s quite insulting but also wrong. Not saying you are part of this camp! But as one lonely optimist in a sea of negativity that’s certainly the perspective I’ve developed from the “conversations” I’ve seen on HN