Comment by simonw
2 days ago
I really don't think that's how it works. Smart, experienced developers who thought coding agents were junk for most of 2025 and think they're useful now in 2026 are not saying that because they got "worn down over time".
It tends to be when the training data wanders into their area of expertise temporarily and they go “OMG, they hype is real. I was so wrong” and then a few releases later they’re on the train and furious that the skills in their domain space have not just stopped improving, but regressed. Cue someone else in a different part of the world starting the same cycle.
Meanwhile the guy who leaned in a year ago and gave up reading the output is beginning to see work grind to a halt and throwing more agents at it is increasingly not working.
You can see these tropes all over social media near constantly.
> You can see these tropes all over social media near constantly.
You should stop using social media as your yardstick.
This is entirely my point. Observing reality, you can see how little impact any of this is truly having. Decision making, communication and alignment is not helped at all by LLMs, it’s just leaving developers with more laundry.
> You should stop using social media as your yardstick.
Yes, don't believe people posting on HN.
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As a smart, experienced developer who's getting worn down over time, I disagree.
I didn’t start using Claude Code until late 2025. Prior to that I would use ChatGPT to give me snippets of code but I was still doing most of the actual code writing. Coworkers told me in late 2025 about how they hadn’t written a line of code in “months” and just use Claude Code/agentic “whatever” so I tried out Claude Code and was pleasantly surprised. It is passable to have entire apps written by LLMs (I’ve made several that I otherwise never would have had the time to create by hand), but I wouldn’t say maintainable or easily extendable. It’s hard to be specific, but there’s something about LLM code that doesn’t look “natural”, and I’m not talking about the excessive use of comments in code. The code itself is unnatural. Functional, but unnatural. I wouldn’t want to suddenly lose LLMs and have to read through and understand and continue enhancing a codebase created by an LLM.
For me it feels a lot like generated images or video. I've made lots of things now, but those that are 100% LLM written "work" but are uncanny, weird and the details are wrong everywhere you care to look in detail.
I think how I'd put it is like, it's a deterministic common denominator thing iterated on, but it's not really intuitive, it's not really "what makes sense" but rather "what would x look like", similar to how you point out it is when it comes to image generation
it's useful for scaffolding but after that I'm not sure how you could rely on it without being in the loop and directing how the code should be like
This has been my experience has well. For code generation, you have to really constrain these LLMs on your coding style, design goals, test cases, and overall expectations. I mainly use these tools to help my understanding of the code and to generate code for very specific problems. Even after all that setup and careful review I'd say it's still a net big speed up for certain software engineering tasks.
Jason Turner gave an excellent talk at last year's CppCon explain how he thinks tools can be used to make generative AI coding assistance safer and more productive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCuRUjxT5L8
> Smart, experienced developers who thought coding agents were junk for most of 2025 and think they're useful now in 2026
The ones you make up in your brain don't count. I'm yet to see anyone serious reverse their claims.
Paul Ford wrote a great piece about this in the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/opinion/ai-software.html?...
> November was, for me and many others in tech, a great surprise. Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful, but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible. I spent an entire session of therapy talking about it.
Max Woolf is a good one: https://minimaxir.com/2026/02/ai-agent-coding/
> The real annoying thing about Opus 4.6/Codex 5.3 is that it’s impossible to publicly say “Opus 4.5 (and the models that came after it) are an order of magnitude better than coding LLMs released just months before it” without sounding like an AI hype booster clickbaiting, but it’s the counterintuitive truth to my personal frustration. [...] A year ago, I was one of those skeptics who was very suspicious of the agentic hype.
DHH - https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/dhhs-new-way-of-w...
> Six months ago, in an episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, David shared how he doesn’t use AI tools to write code: he types out all his code. But things have changed a lot since then.
> In this episode, we discuss his approach to building software, how it’s changed in the last six months, and why he now takes an agent-first approach, and how he barely writes any code by hand.
Linus Torvalds, two weeks ago (though I don't have evidence that he was a skeptic before) https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/CAHk-=wi4zC+Ze8e+p3tMv8T...
> There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it.
Donald Knuth! https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cyc...
> Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I'd been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic's hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I'll have to revise my opinions about "generative AI" one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving.
Okay so you have no names of experienced developers saying that coding agents are now useful when they weren't before. The only two you have actually saying that are... not working as software engineers.
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You're being one of the voices trying to do the wearing down right now in this very thread imo
Of course it doesn't seem that way to you. Preachers view themselves as spreading the good word, they don't see how annoying it is being preached at
I was getting useful coding work done with GPT 3.5. I think devs saying "the models are finally good enough" this year are just trying to save face from their own previous irrational denials.
Useful, yes, sometimes, but it wasn't fully automated "Here's our JIRA board URL, fix everything that's rated 1-3 story points and in the current sprint".
Now it is.