These agents are ridiculous. I've been more productive in my personal projects in the last week than I've been in the last 8 years.
In the last three weeks I've:
Written the +3 disk checker for the Plus3 I've been putting off for 3 years
Started the ZX Spectrum Next roguelike I've been planning since I got my Next
Converted a 25k line Pascal/Delphi mod tracker to Rust and got it building on Windows, Mac, Linux, and the web (for the music to my game, of course)
Tidied up the parsing on my BDD framework
Fixed a couple of bugs in dokker and GoCrest
It's insane.
There are two issues with this though:
- I've learned almost nothing about how to actually solve the problems these projects present
- I don't fully trust some of it.
And that second one is the bigger problem.
Because everything works. Impressively well. Suspiciously well. The kind of “this shouldn’t be this easy” well.
I can build things faster than ever, but I’m also one layer removed from understanding them. When something breaks, I’m not debugging my thinking - I’m debugging something I half-generated and half-understand.
It’s like going from writing code to reviewing code… except the author is an overconfident ghost.
I’m not convinced this is bad. In fact, it might be the whole point. Maybe the skill shifts from “how do I build this?” to “how do I steer this?” and “how do I know when it’s wrong?” My tests and specifications aren't always air tight, and agents fill the gaps if they think they can get away with it.
But it does feel like cheating.
And also like the future.
I've been used to being slightly removed from coding as a Tech lead, and it definitely feels good being productive again. I can go into a meeting having set an agent a task, and be reasonably confident the task will be done, documented and tested.
The solution to the overconfidence? The same as it always was. Good engineering habits, small, vertical slices, well thought out testing strategies, and good communication. Coding was never the hard part of development, we still have that (for now).
We are the monks of old, sitting in our isolation, copying text by eye and by hand. In the same way the printing presses destroyed the monk's art, the era of hand crafting software is over too, for better or worse.
But.. just but.. maybe there's room for the storyteller, the one who can weave these tools the best will surge ahead and create new, bold creations with them.
Now.. why does the Sorcerer's Apprentice come to mind?
