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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

#41

Post by dkarl »

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 If I install newer packages, Claude will revert to outdated packages/implementations that were popular four years ago.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

> At the end of the day, though, I'm usually left with the feeling I'd have made more solid progress with slower, closer attention

Does you think this feeling reflects the usual underestimation we're all guilty of, or do you think it's accurate?

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#42

Post by all2 »

ferguess_k wrote: post #38

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 know the kinds of things I'm looking for, and I use AI to walk a solution in. Either I use the output of the LLM as-is (for throwaway stuff) or I use it as a jumping off point for my own work _without_ the AI.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#43

Post by ferguess_k »

all2 wrote: post #42
ferguess_k wrote: post #38

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 know the kinds of things I'm looking for, and I use AI to walk a solution in.

I agree. I think it's fine to do so. I usually prefer to write my code without AI (except for bootstrapping it).

In my work as a DE, I mostly use AI to write scripts for me. For example, how to do this in PySpark? I kinda refused to memorize any of these because I'm simply not very interested, and I can always spend a week to memorize the fundamentals if I need.

In my side projects, I use AI extensively. Same as you, I use AI for problem space mapping, or sort of. For example, I have some source code, how do I structure them better? I have read the MIDI standard and thought this piece of binary code means blah, can you please confirm for me? Well AI is OK for these kinds of work.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#44

Post by svilen_dobrev »

i have mentored a few people to become Programmers. Some for months, some for years. It's like teaching someone to ride a bycicle. Hand-holding first, then hand-guiding, then short flights, then longer... Different people pick stuff at different pace and shape.. but they do learn.. if they want to.

What i completely miss in these LLM parrots-agents-generators, is the learning. You can't teach them anything. They would not remember. Tabula rasa / Clean slate, every time. They may cite Shakespeare - or whatever code scrubbed from github - and concoct it to unrecognizability - but that's it. Hard rules or guardrails for every-little-thing are unsustainable to keep (and/or create) - expert-systems, rule-based no-code/low-code.. has been unsuccessful for decades).

Maybe, next AI wave.

And, there's no understanding. But that also applies to quite some people :/

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#45

Post by ikerino »

dkarl wrote: post #41
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…

> At the end of the day, though, I'm usually left with the feeling I'd have made more solid progress with slower, closer attention Does you think this feeling reflects the usual underestimation we're all guilty of, or do you think it's accurate?

In terms of absolute progress (e.g. towards finishing a feature or MVP) I think it it could have to do with a usual underestimation (optimism) for timelines.

I'm using Cursor mostly for exploratory/weekend projects. I usually opt for stacks/libraries I'm less familiar with, so I think there's some optimism/uncertainty to account for there.

I think there's another aspect to progress involving learning/becoming fluent in a codebase. When I build something from scratch, I become the expert, so familiar that later features become very easy/obvious to implement.

I haven't had this experience when I take a heavily agent-driven approach. I'm steering, but I'm not learning much. The more I progress, the harder new features feel to implement.

I don't think this is unique to working with AI. I guess the takeaway is that attention and familiarity matter.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#46

Post by marstall »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #32

I use LLMs for various purposes in day to day development. I don't use any of the tools mentioned in the article because I'm using intellij and don't want to replace a tool that has lots of stuff that I use all the time. But aside from that, it's good advice and matches my experience. I've dabbled with plugins for intellij but wasn't really happy with those. But ever since chat gpt for desktop started interfacing dir…

Yes I find chatGPT/Jetbrains (RubyMine) in my case is the most usable setup I've encountered.

It's like Rubymine is "home" for me - and chatGPT's macOS client has become another "home" for me so it's quite convenient that they talk to each other now.

I have a little FOMO about Cursor though. ChatGPT will automatically apply its suggested changes to my open editor - but I have the sense Cursor will do a bit more? Apply changes to multiple files? And have knowledge of your whole project, not just open files? Can someone fill me in

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#47

Post by giantg2 »

ferguess_k wrote: post #38

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…

Even code completion has issues. It might get the structure right, but it usually doesn't understand the business logic and I end up switching out what codes/vars are being used.

Re: The role of developer skills in agentic coding

#48

Post by _1tem »

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’t replace me but now I can go much farther and faster.
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