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The role of developer skills in agentic coding

martinfowler.com

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Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#161

Post by jvanderbot »

aulin wrote: post #106
jvanderbot wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're wrong. I have all the expertise but none of the time to generate 100s of lines of boilerplate API calls to get the data together, and no interest in formatting it correctly for consumption, let alone doing so state fully to allow interaction. These are trivial problems to solve that are highly tedious and do not affect whatsoever the business at hand. Perfect drudgery for automation, and just scanning the resu…

I am not wrong. You simply are not the kind of developer I am thinking about. And believe me the other kind is way more represented.

Ok, well, then you're not wrong.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#162

Post by elric »

I'm already seeing developers spending more time communicating with their AI than with their team. I don't think that's a good evolution. Many of us aren't the best communicators, but it's a skill we typically polish as we become more senior. I worry about what will happen to junior devs who spend more time talking to/pairing with AI tham their human coworkers.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#163

Post by elric »

codr7 wrote: post #114

I don't get it, at all. Why are experienced developers so enthusiastic about chaining themselves to such an obviously crappy and unfulfilling experience? I like writing code and figuring stuff out, that's why I chose a career in software development in the first place.

Instead of writing code, you can now figure out the code that your AI wrote and effectively treat everything as a legacy system.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#164

Post by globalise83 »

elric wrote: post #162

I'm already seeing developers spending more time communicating with their AI than with their team. I don't think that's a good evolution. Many of us aren't the best communicators, but it's a skill we typically polish as we become more senior. I worry about what will happen to junior devs who spend more time talking to/pairing with AI tham their human coworkers.

Upfront context, precise statements of what is required, immediate constructive feedback? What's not to like?

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#165

Post by _puk »

_1tem wrote: post #48

Developer skill is obviously still essential — you can’t steer if you couldn’t drive. But what about developer energy? Before AI I could only code about 2 hours per day (actual time spent writing code) but with Claude Code I can easily code for 5 hours straight without breaking a sweat. It feels like riding an e-bike instead of a bicycle. AI genuinely feels like Steve Jobs analogy of a bicycle for the mind — it doesn…

Love the ebike analogy!

You're right though, you need to be able to steer, but you don't necessarily need to be able to map read.

Case in point, I recently stood up my first project in supabase, cursor happily created the tables, secure RLS rules etc in a fraction of the time it would take me.

To stop it getting spaghetti I had to add a rule "I'm developing a first version - add everything to an SQL file that tears down and recreates everything cleanly".

This prevented hundreds of migration files being created, allowed me to retain and context, and every now and then ask "have you just made my database insecure", which 50:50 resulted in me learning something, or a "whoopsie, let me sort that".

If I wasn't aware of this then it's highly likely my project would be full of holes.

Maybe it still is, but ignorance is bliss (and 3 different LLMs can't be wrong can they?!)

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#166

Post by codr7 »

marcellus23 wrote: post #155
codr7 wrote: post #114

I don't get it, at all. Why are experienced developers so enthusiastic about chaining themselves to such an obviously crappy and unfulfilling experience? I like writing code and figuring stuff out, that's why I chose a career in software development in the first place.

I can imagine people making the same argument decades ago about higher-level languages being "crappy and unfulfilling" compared to writing assembly. After all, you're not even writing the instructions yourself, you're just describing what you want and the computer figures out what to do.

The (pretty substantial) difference is now the computer is telling you what to do.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#167

Post by codr7 »

malyk wrote: post #158
codr7 wrote: post #114

I don't get it, at all. Why are experienced developers so enthusiastic about chaining themselves to such an obviously crappy and unfulfilling experience? I like writing code and figuring stuff out, that's why I chose a career in software development in the first place.

Because you'll be replaced by those engineers in N months/years when they can outperform you because they are wizards with the new tools. It's like failing to adopt compiled code and sticking to punch cards. Or like refusing to use open source libraries and writing everything yourself. Or deciding that using the internet isn't useful. Yes, developing as a craft is probably more fulfilling. But if you want it to be a…

Let them replace me then, it's not a job I feel like doing anyway.

And when they have forgotten all about how to actually write software, the market is mine.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#168

Post by amputect »

moqizhengz wrote: post #88
kristopolous wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 has an easy fix. Clone the dependency you want to use in the directory of your code. Instruct it to go into the directory and look at that code in order to complete task X: "I've got a new directory xyz, in it contains a library to do feature abc. I'll need to include it here to do A to function B and so on" The weird version mixing bug will disappear. If it's closed source, then just do the documentation. You nee…

This is a very typical reply when we see someone pointing out the flaws of AI coding tools. "You are using it wrong, AI can do everything if you properly prompt it" Yes, it can write everything if I provide enough context, but it ain't 'Intelligence' if context ~= output. The point here is providing enough context itself is challenging and requires expertise, this makes AI ides unusable for many scenarios.

We already have a term for prompting a computer in a way that causes it to predictably output useful software; we called that programming, and people on this website used to think that knowing how to do that was a worthwhile field of study.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#169

Post by usrbinbash »

meowface wrote: post #152
codr7 wrote: post #114

I don't get it, at all. Why are experienced developers so enthusiastic about chaining themselves to such an obviously crappy and unfulfilling experience? I like writing code and figuring stuff out, that's why I chose a career in software development in the first place.

Because on net it often saves tons and tons of time and effort if you know how to use it. Luddism is a strange philosophy for a software engineer.

> Luddism is a strange philosophy for a software engineer.

Luddism and critically evaluating the net benefit and cost of a piece of tech, are 2 very different things.

And the latter is not strange for a SWE at all, in fact I'd say it's an essential skill.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#170

Post by usrbinbash »

kristopolous wrote: post #68
ikerino wrote: post #12

I use Cursor for most of my development these days. This article aligns pretty closely with my experiences. A few additional observations: 1. Anecdotally, AI agents feel stuck somewhere circa ~2021. If I install newer packages, Claude will revert to outdated packages/implementations that were popular four years ago. This is incredibly frustrating to watch and correct for. Providing explicit instructions for which pac…

#1 has an easy fix. Clone the dependency you want to use in the directory of your code. Instruct it to go into the directory and look at that code in order to complete task X: "I've got a new directory xyz, in it contains a library to do feature abc. I'll need to include it here to do A to function B and so on" The weird version mixing bug will disappear. If it's closed source, then just do the documentation. You nee…

> You need to line up the breadcrumbs right.

And in the time I line up the breadcrumbs to help this thing to emulate an actual thought process, I would probably alrady have finshed doing it myself, especially since I speed up the typing-it-all-out part using a much less "clever" and "agentic" AI system.

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