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.
What’s fascinating about this conversation is … how do people think software used to be made ? With talented and knowledgeable developers who would never “hallucinate” an API or a library function ? With cybersec experts who would never put their user’s data in jeopardy ? With performance investigators checking the computational complexity of each function ? Bitch please…
Software engineering is not the kind of mystical cathedral building these people have in mind, it’s more like a musty workshop in Pakistan where they make tractor tires with no safety equipment and a cigarette in their mouth. We’ve been throwing imperfect humans in various states of lucidity at every problem known to man for 30 years but suddenly people start believing that their bog standard CRUD software should be written by monks having attained cosmic godhood.