I sometimes feel like the cognitive cost of agentic coding is so much higher than a skilled human. There is so much more bootstrap and handling process around making sure agents don't go off the rails (they will), or that they will adhere to their goals (they won't). And in my experience fixing issues downstream takes more effort than solving the issue at the root.

The pipe dream of agents handling Github Issue -> PullRequest -> Resolve Issue becomes a nightmare of fixing downstream regressions or other chaos unleashed by agents given too much privilege. I think people optimistic on agents are either naive or hype merchants grifting/shilling.

I can understand the grinning panic of the hype merchants because we've collectively shovelled so much capital into AI with very little to show for it so far. Not to say that AI is useless, far from it, but there's far more over-optimism than realistic assessment of the actual accuracy and capabilities.