Agentic development is basically a scam IMO. I’ve written about this before, but collaborative coding with AI is a huge productivity boost and you can still own all the quality. Ultimately with agentic development there’s too much you can’t, and won’t, review. The quality slips out of your hands.

I still read all the code AI produces, and I have a specific workflow. I scaffold the API first using AI, then review it for quality. Then I write tests, and review them for quality. Implementation is last, and technically I need not review the code but I choose to.

When I’ve done agentic development, the only thing I’ve accomplished is 100x more token burn with lower-quality code. It’s also not faster, because the tokens cost time and so many mistakes are made that must be cleaned up. The agents burn so much time going around in circles, when I could’ve just steered the model to write a good implementation.

Keep in mind, this is very fast. Models still produce thousands of lines of code in mere minutes. And with tests backing them up and an API frozen, the model goes much faster as it can iterate and has a framework for what it’s doing.