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.
But they do work, maybe not as a full replacement but my god the amount of boilerplate I can avoid in creating unit tests from scratch. Extracting and finding information in the code base is also useful, not everything is an easy text search of tracing a few code paths. It’s an incredible tool for these kinds of work.
If it becomes harder to tell the difference then it also means it’s closer to matching reality. And todays AI can do very impressive “reasoning”, managing to debug complex issues I have had.
The most important part is that you as developer is fully responsible and can stand behind what they do and deliver using AI agents.
Right? The bottle has opened. It has taken so much mundane work out of programming. Also, I feel like a human is just as likely to create great looking code changes with a possible flaw. You just have to review the code. Whether it’s a person or a bot, “lgtm” can only be used sparingly.