Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

> If not, why did you even study that?

I like to make computers do the things I want. Since I was a kid, the satisfaction from programming or any sort of "computer engineering" (using the word engineering VERY loosely here) is in making something specific happen.

Sometimes, that means understanding the correct data structure to use, picking the right algorithm, and other computer science-y things.

Other times, and more often (for me), it means death by a thousand papercuts in managing third party dependencies, boilerplate, and other tedium and minutia.

I'm not someone who is "proud" of barely coding anymore, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the "structural soundness" of using LLMs this way (most of my coding is personal/hobbyist work), but I can confidently say that I don't really code just because I love coding, at least necessarily. I like making stuff.

It’s more AI copypasta as it goes further along where it gets really into the how and not the why.

“But here’s the twist: that search I described earlier was never sent to botd. All the history was in SQLite, so I pointed another agent at it and got the analysis anyway. The tool died; the data didn’t.”

If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter…

I've been a software dev for 25 years. In the past year I've hand written maybe 10 lines of code. For the first 2-3 months i would read it, then I figured out how to really use AI/code gen and the amount created was more than I could read. I can work on 2-3 projects at once, or 2-3 parts of a larger project at once. More than that I can't keep task switching. The speed and complexity of what I'm able to create is 10x doing it by hand. In the hands of someone that understands system design it's a great tool, but still need fundamentals. I've seen junior's build stuff that would never deploy and would crash with a handful of users.

ai;dr

Can we stop posting obviously slop articles? If you can't make the effort to write the article, I'm not going to make the effort to read it.

Unfortunate to see an otherwise-good article padded by AI-isms ("But here’s the twist: that search I described earlier was never sent to botd. All the history was in SQLite, so I pointed another agent at it and got the analysis anyway. The tool died; the data didn’t.", amongst other examples).

Maisem Ali writes about how they have not stopped engineering despite handing production of code over to AI. I think that's an interesting perspective for a few reasons, but most of all, I'm not sure I agree.

First, we see a prime example of how that can blow up. "botd died this month. It crumbled under its own weight." It's hard to imagine how an agent harness (or is it an overlay on top of other harnesses?) could crumble under its own weight from sheer technical complexity. What makes a tool like this "crumble"? If properly architected, it seems that any outside change could be adaptable. Failing tests could be fixed.

This AI coding evolution has given us the ability to spin up prototypes we don't understand the inner workings of, but I believe for anything of value (and, I would argue, botd appeared to have value to Maisem) we should at the very least understand and influence the architecture and engineering of what we're building. If Maisem had done that for botd, it would not and _could not_ have "crumbled under its own weight". Whatever outside influence required change within botd would have been manageable.

Second, the off-loading of the production of this article indicates to me a lack of respect (with no offence to Maisem, because this is what much of the industry is doing today) for the value in thinking through the writing process. There's a lot that I've learned personally about software I worked on that only came to me through trying to write explainers. Taking a step back from the software we build and looking at it from a birds-eye view, to share how it is constructed or how to use it, helps develop our understanding.

Maisem's article is already very good, and I hope that is demonstrative of their own writing! I would read more! But I want to read words written by a person for other people. AI can help edit, it can help us build ideas, but in code and in our written word, AI should not be _the author_.