Comment by rsyring

It's not fear. It's experience. I've seen the kind of code agents write. And it's too often crap even when it "works". This isn't about beautiful code. It's about what we've built actually making sense to a, hopefully talented, software engineer.

Maybe more important than that, it's about taking the time to build the mental models that facilitate product development and the next iterations of coding. When agents write all the software, the majority of engineers I've seen, including myself, lose almost all context to what is actually going on at anything but a very high almost laughable level. And they then become almost completely dependent on the agent for the next iteration of development b/c they don't really understand what is there currently.

Does this matter? From a software perspective, it depends on what you are building and for whom.

From a human perspective, it depends on the human. I've seen good developers that I trust historically churn out crap code with agents because it was just too much to review. And there is some kind of weird addiction like thing happening in our brains when using AI that makes it incredibly difficult for us to slow down and review all the code it writes. In part b/c agents are great at crapping out 3K line PRs like it's nobody's business. But it needs to be someone's business to understand what we are shipping for anything but non-trivial projects. And truly understanding 3K line PRs hour after hour is just not sustainable for most of us. Our eyes glaze over and we just ship it because that's what we do now as an industry.

I think wary is the wrong term. I've learned agentic development's strengths and weaknesses. And the tools, as they work currently, churn out code at a rocket's pace that any good software engineer would immediately reject in years past. I don't like their code, I don't like how their code development process interacts with my brain. It's not waryness, it's dislike and mistrust.

So, yes, they can be assistants. And they can even write code. But I think in much smaller chunks than most people are using them these days.

The idea that we should build software factories and/or otherwise just turn agents loose and isolate humans to the product/QA level is insane to me. But I understand why we are here and I realize that a large portion of the business and dev community likes this new model.

I'm hoping that not doing it that way will end up be a competitive advantage in the long run. Both for the software we are producing and for the devs that are creating it.