alt Hacker NewsI stopped using coding agents after more than one and a half year of active use, it really started to become way too boring, and I’m t a point where I just hate having to babysit them and for the 200th time make it understand what the actual goal is… and to be honest, going back to writing code by hand without assistance is really hard at first you continuously have that little voice telling you how simple that would be with an agent. Then after a little bit you’re back to being productive, but I still get that voice in my mind. I’m wondering if that’s how addiction feels (way lighter of course).
That whole experience of going deep for a while into LLM coding, then trying to leave it behind made me pretty pessimistic about the future of our profession. We are creating a whole industry of people delegating their ability to work to a software stack currently controlled by basically 2 companies (that both have very sketchy financials). Doesn’t feel healthy
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Neither of these points feel true anymore.
Models are very much predictable these days (except anthropic models). The real issue stems from letting them work on their own for far too long. Also we are not controlled by 2 companies anymore as kimi k3, deepseek flash (and soon pro) as the ultra-cheap variants, glm 5.2 especially is a direct replacement for opus 4.8.
Models will only get better and cheaper I wouldn't feel too pessimistic and wouldn't feel too bad on relying on them to accelerate work and free up mental space from menial tasks.
As a personal side-note I never let my agents do architectual design I only use them for implementing. I always found the actual coding part of programming extremely boring and coming up with designs, experimenting and testing the fun part.
I'd be really interested to see all the software that is written by agents. Whenever I touch agents or ai I can't get much use out of them. My understanding is the value when I think aloud with them/treat them as a better google search, but thats about it. Except one off web stuff, that is a pretty neat use case.
But lets be real, anything moderately complex that is out of the domain of publicly available sample code is hit or miss compared to the time invested running the loop. I'd much rather invest the time in myself.
What a lot of people don't talk about is the inherent security nightmare of trusting ai agents and the sheer data exfiltration happening behind the scenes.