[linesofcode]

When you first began learning how to program were you building and shipping apps the next day? No.

Agentic programming is a skill-set and a muscle you need to develop just like you did with coding in the past.

Things didn’t just suddenly go downhill after an arbitrary tipping point - what happened is you hit a knowledge gap in the tooling and gave up.

Reflect on what went wrong and use that knowledge next time you work with the agent.

For example, investing the time in building a strong test suite and testing strategy ahead of time which both you and the agent can rely on.

Being able to manage the agent and getting quality results on a large, complex codebase is a skill in itself, it won’t happen over night.

It takes practice and repetition with these tools to level-up, just like any thing else.

[terabytest]

Your point is fair, but it rests on a major assumption I'd question: that the only limit lies with the user, and the tooling itself has none. What if it’s more like “you can’t squeeze blood from a stone”? That is, agentic coding may simply have no greater potential than what I've already tried. To be fair I haven't gone all the way in trying to make it work but, even if some minor workarounds exist, the full promise being hyped might not be realistically attainable.

[linesofcode]

How can one judge potential without fully understanding or having used it to its full potential?

I don’t think agentic programming is some promised land of instant code without bugs.

It’s just a force multiplier for what you can do.

[aban-m]

The point is precisely this. How do you know you have used it to its full potential? "You're holding it wrong" has no limits.