Except that coding agents will do this at times. That's half the problem. A human will forget details and exaggerate others, but LLMs fail in spectacular ways that humans rarely would, like trying to copy a document from memory rather than one word at a time, side by side, or rewriting the whole thing just to make some simple changes. Coding agents will delete tests or return True to get them to pass - something you would never expect of even a junior professional.
And I know this because I see it all the time. I use composer-2 and sonnet 4.6 on a regular basis. It's not much better for my colleagues who use Opus or GPT or any of the other frontier models. Most of the time it's fine, but other times it does things simply unforgivable for a human. I have to watch the agent closely so that it doesn't decide to nuke my database; I don't have to do that with any of my juniors, even those with little experience and poor discipline.
> nuke
> I don’t have to do that with any of my juniors…
For some values of “nuke,” I absolutely have had to do that with juniors in the past. Perhaps you’re referring to a single rm -r or hilarious force push or something, but undertrained and unsupervised juniors regularly introduce things like SQL injection, XSS, etc. simply because they don’t know any better yet. This isn’t saying “AI is better across the board” - I just don’t think they’re comparable, also think AI shouldn’t be used to chop the bottom 5 rungs off our career ladder. But let’s not pretend juniors can be left alone with a codebase without any worries.