I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming. The output is broken, but in a way that’s getting harder and harder to detect. Which is exactly what you’d expect from an increasingly accurate statistical model.
You know the feeling that you want to rewrite a project? But you know that most rewrites are a bad idea.
Be it your own, old code. Or code you inherited.
There is a small chance that the world realizes that they went in the wrong direction and nothing can get fixed. That will be the time of rewrites.
No, I don’t expect this to be very likely. The agent code will remain, and human programmers get yelled at for not fixing it fast enough.
Rewriting all code after everyone has been using AI tools to break it doesn’t sound any better than writing good code now, be it with or without LLMs.