alt Hacker News> But guided? The models can write better code than most developers. That’s the part people don’t want to sit with. When guided.
Where do you draw the line between just enough guidance vs too much hand holding to an agent? At some point, wouldn't it be better to just do it yourself and be done with the project (while also build your muscle memory, experiences and the mental model for future projects, just like tons of regular devs have done in the past)
The line is scope.
I'm not asking an agent to build me a full-stack app. That's where you end up babysitting it like a kindergartener and honestly you'd be faster doing it yourself. The way I use agents is focused, context-driven, one small task at a time.
For example: i need a function that takes a dependency graph, topologically sorts it, and returns the affected nodes when a given node changes. That's well-scoped. The agent writes it, I review it, done.
But say I'm debugging a connection pool leak in Postgres where connections aren't being released back under load because a transaction is left open inside a retry loop. I'm not handing that to an agent. I already know our system. I know which service is misbehaving, I know the ORM layer, I know where the connection lifecycle is managed. The context needed to guide the agent properly would take longer to write than just opening the code and tracing it myself.
That's the line. If the context you'd need to provide is larger than the task itself, just do it. If the task is well-defined and the output is easy to verify, let the agent rip.
The muscle memory point is real though. i still hand-write code when I'm learning something new or exploring a space I don't understand yet. AI is terrible for building intuition in unfamiliar territory because you can't evaluate output you don't understand. But for mundane scaffolding, boilerplate, things that repeat? I don't. llife's too short to hand-write your 50th REST handler.