One thing I rarely see mentioned is that often creating code by hand is simply faster (at least for me) than using AI. Creating a plan for AI, waiting for execution, verifying, prompting again etc. can take more time than just doing it on my own with a plan in my head (and maybe some notes). Creating something from scratch or doing advanced refactoring is almost always faster with AI, but most of my daily tasks are bugs or features that are 10% coding and 90% knowing how to do it.

When was the last time you tried?

I think trying agents to do larger tasks was always very hit or miss, up to about the end of last year.

In the past couple of months I have found them to have gotten a lot better (and I'm not the only one).

My experience with what coding assistants are good for shifted from:

smart autocomplete -> targeted changes/additions -> full engineering

> I've dipped into agentic work now and again, but never been very impressed with the output (well, that there is any functioning output is insanely impressive, but it isn't code I want to be on the hook for complaining).

> I hear a lot of people saying the same, but similarly a bunch of people I respect saying they barely write code anymore. It feels a little tricky to square these up sometimes.

It squares up just fine.

You ever read a blog post or comment and think "Yeah, this is definitely AI generated"? If you can recognise it, would you accept a blog post, reviewed by you, for your own blog/site?

I won't; I'll think "eww" and rewrite.

The developers with good AI experiences don't get the same "eww" feeling when reading AI-generated code. The developers with poor AI experiences get that "eww" feeling all the time when reviewing AI code and decide not to accept the code.

Well, that's my theory anyway.

> It feels a little tricky to square these up sometimes.

In my experience, this heavily depends on the task, and there's a massive chasm between tasks where it's a good and bad fit. I can definitely imagine people working only on one side of this chasm and being perplexed by the other side.

I still write code but do not push everything off to the agent. Try my best to write small tasks. ~20% of the time I have to get in there. If someone says they're absolutely not writing a line of code they must have amazing guardrails.

My experience is that the first iteration output from a single agent is not what I want to be on the hook for. What squares it for me with "not writing code anymore" is the iterative process to improve outputs:

1) Having review loops between agents (spawn separate "reviewer" agents) and clear tests / eval criteria improved results quite a bit for me. 2) Reviewing manually and giving instructions for improvements is necessary to have code I can own

I was in the same boat as you until I saw DHH post about how he’s changed his use of agents. In his talk with Lex Fridman his approach was similar to mine and it really felt like a kernel of sanity amongst the hype. So when he said he’s changed his approach I had another look. I’m using agents (Claude code) every day now. I still write code every day too. (So does Dax Raad from OpenCode to throw a bit more weight behind this stance). I’m not convinced the models can own a production code base and that therefore engineers need to maintain their skills sufficiently to be responsible. I find agents helpful for a lot of stuff, usually heavily patterned code with a lot of prior art. I find CC consistently sucks at writing polars code. I honestly don’t enjoy using agents at all and I don’t think anyone can honestly claim they know how this is going to shake out. But I feel by using the tools myself I have a much stronger sense of reality amongst the hype.