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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

#201
post #121
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 If I install newer packages, Claude will revert to outdated packages/implementations that were popular four years ago.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…

I don’t do much development anymore, but this is always how I felt when ORM’s like Hibernate came out. At first they were amazing and were used for everything. Eventually it became obvious that as the complexity of the code went up linearly, the difficulty of troubleshooting and optimizing the code went up exponentially. I learned to only used ORM’s for basic stuff, which they are very much useful, but when things go…

One of the things I love most about AI coding tools is how they make it easier than ever to move away from complex, fragile abstractions like ORMs. The main reason we’ve often avoided writing raw SQL repositories by hand is that it’s tedious, but now, much of that boilerplate can be generated by AI.

More broadly, wherever you might have relied on a heavyweight dependency, you can often replace it with AI-generated code tailored to the task at hand. You might think this would increase the maintenance burden, but au contraire: reviewing and taking ownership of AI-generated code is often simpler and more sustainable in the long term than dealing with complex libraries you don’t fully control.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#202
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 don't enjoy the keypresses of building useful features. I like identifying what needs to be changed, and how, in abstract terms. These tools quickly help me verify those changes are right. If I need to call the VideoService to fetch some data, I don't want to spend time writing that and the tests that come with it. I'd rather outsource that part.

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Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#204
post #42

I don't really like AI in IDE. I don't want them to think for me. Code completion and Intellisense is good enough. That said, I think there are 3 items that are important: - Quickly grasp a new framework or a new language. People might expect you to do so because of AI's help. 2 weeks might be the maximum, instead of the minimum. The same for juniors. - Focus on the real important things. So instead of trying to memo…

- Be willing to exclude AI from your thought process. If you rely AI on everything, including algorithms and designs, this might impact your understanding. Most of the time I'm using AI for problem space mapping (I'm doing dirt simple CRUD dev right now) and decomposition. It's ok at that, but even the deep research mode of Claude leaves some things to be desired. I feel like an editor now, more than an engineer. I k…

> I feel like an editor now, more than an engineer.

I have been using LLMs more and more and I think they are great for brainstorming and editing and getting to an 80% solution. But just like an editor needs to know the fundamentals of writing, you still need to know the fundamentals of software to be effective as an engineer.

Side note: I remember when I first came upon a really sophisticated system that made me feel more like an assembler than a developer. It was drupal in the late 2000s. I ran away from that as fast as I could, even though the money was good.

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