alt Hacker NewsA lot of these resonate with me, particularly the mental fatigue. It feels like normal coding forced me to slow my brain down, whereas now my mind is the limit.
For context, I started an experiment to rebuild a previous project entirely with LLMs back in June '25 ("fully vibecoded" - not even reading the source).
After iterating and finally settling on a design/plan/debug loop that works relatively well, I'm now experiencing an old problem like new: doing too much!
As a junior engineer, it's common to underestimate the scope of some task, and to pile on extra features/edge cases/etc. until you miss your deadline. A valuable lesson any new programmer/software engineer necessarily goes though.
With "agentic engineering," it's like I'm right back at square one. Code is so cheap/fast to write, I find myself doing it the "right way" from the get go, adding more features even though I know I shouldn't, and ballooning projects until they reach a state of never launching.
I feel like a kid again (:
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What do you mean doing it the "right way" from the get-go, as then paired with more features, ballooning projects, and never launching?
Is that why it's in quotes because it's the opposite of the right way?
If there's one thing I learned in a decade+ of professional programming, it's that we can't predict the future. That's it, that simple. YANGNI. (also: model the data, but I'm trying to make a point here)
We got into coding because we like to code; we invent reasons and justifications to code more, ship more, all the world's problems can be solved if only developers shipped more code.
Nirvana is reached when they that love and care about the shipping of the code know also that it's not the shipping of the code that matters.
I spent more time correcting LLMs or agentics systems than just learning the domain and doing the coding myself. I mainly leave LLM to the boring work of doing tedious repetitive code.
If I give it anything resembling anything that I'm not an expert on, it will make a mess of things.