Yeah that's a real good point. I focused a lot on the short term issues of agentic slop but you're right the long term impact of this is going to be staggering.

That mental model is ultimately the more important part for the long-term health of the project. Coding is more an activity of communication between people; having an artifact that tells the computer what to do is almost an incidental side-effect of successful communication.

100%. Something I wanted to touch on in my post but cut because I couldn't weave it in well was more on the relationship with "The Problem" and "The Code". Pre-AI coding acted as a forcing function for the problem context. It's really hard to effectively build software without understanding what you're ultimately driving towards. With agentic coding we're stripping that forcing function out.

Institutional knowledge is already something that's been hard to quantify and value by C-suites and now you're ripping out the crucial mechanism for building that.

I see a lot of memes with people being like "in 5 years we're just gonna press yes and not understand what the agent is doing" and I keep thinking "why do people think this is funny?"

One huge issue is that LLMs do weird and stupid things differently than how humans do them.

If you've developed an eye for reading human-made changes, you're not necessarily going to recognize new and surprising failure modes as easily. It's literally harder than regular code review.

Humans with modern tooling, for example, rarely hallucinate field/class/method/object names because non-spicy autocomplete keeps them on the rails. LLMs seem much more willing to decide the menu bar is .menuBar and not .topMenu, probably because their training corpus is full of the former.

Surely we can come up with networks of trust for this sort of thing, so that you don't have to deal with PRs from people with no references.

Humans are also lazy. I won't make 5,000 line changes just because I feel like refactoring while adding a field to a query. A LLM might, and I don't want to read all of that.

I feel ya. I've been told the same thing at my job as well.

I'd say "find a new gig" but honestly every place has been bitten by this hype train it seems like.

I've been doing a hybrid approach where I use the chatbot to do rudimentary things like label renames and then just do a lot of my work "the normal way". That way I log some token usage to say I use the tools and then bet that my output isn't going to be drastically different from my coworkers.

Then when the hype train dies we can all hopefully go back to doing what we do best. It's just a shitty period that I hope we can ride out.

Find a company that values engineers. The one you're at doesn't, whether they understand that or not.

I've seen lots of people describe LLMs as a junior developer, but for this very reason, they are worse than a junior. I can train a junior and build them into senior, so the time spent correcting mistakes is still worthwhile. I can't train an LLM, so correcting mistakes is just pointless.