[tptacek]

I don't think you read the sentence you're responding to carefully enough. The antecedent of "this" isn't "coding agents" generally: it's "the value of an agent getting you past the blank page stage to a point where the substantive core of your feature functions well enough to start iterating on". If you want to respond to the argument I made there, you have to respond to the actual argument, not a broader one that's easier (and much less interesting) to take swipes at.

[sjdjsin]

My understanding of your argument is:

Because agents are good on this one specific axis (which I agree with and use fwiw), there’s no reason to object to them as a whole

My argument is:

The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. The small win (among others) is not worth the amounts of slop devs now have to deal with.

[tptacek]

Sounds like a very poorly managed team.

[roughly]

In tech? Say it ain't so.

[dingnuts]

in any organization???

[JasonSage]

I have to agree. My experience working on a team with mixed levels of seniority and coding experience is that everybody got some increase in productivity and some increase in quality.

The ones who spend more time developing their agentic coding as a skillset have gotten much better results.

In our team people are also more willing to respond to feedback because nitpicks and requests to restructure/rearchitect are evaluated on merit instead of how time-consuming or boring they would have been to take on.

[bsder]

> My experience working on a team with mixed levels of seniority and coding experience is that everybody got some increase in productivity and some increase in quality.

Is that true? There have been a couple of papers that show that people have the perception that they are more productive because the AI feels like motion (you're "stuck" less often) when in reality it has been a net negative.