Comment by notnullorvoid

I like LLMs, it's legitimately impressive to see people vibe code solutions (some times even to novel ideas). Agents are a much better use of LLMs than auto complete (which is terrible).

However I've tried coding agents, and well they suck... for me. Nearly all of the code I write these days is performance sensitive, as well as design sensitive (making abstractions for others to use), and not close to what could be considered boilerplate. The boilerplate I do write usually takes a trivial amount of time to write by hand. I'll keep trying whatever is new in AI every few months, I certainly don't want to be left behind, but so far that strategy hasn't left me optimistic.

> but the code is shitty, like that of a junior developer

It's worse than a junior. Juniors learn and grow, if they're a good junior it's often fairly rapid and self directed. Juniors can also ask for guidance or help, this is something maybe agents will be capable of in the future, but I could see it going pretty poorly for reasons tied to the first point about not learning. While LLMs contain a ton of information, more than a junior could, the junior is a better reasoning machine; I don't consider LLM "reasoning" to be anything close to the meatbag version.

> but the craft

Craft matters, it's important to enjoy and take pride in your work. If you enjoy managing AI agents that's fine, lots of programmers end up on the manager career path, but it's not for everyone.