I see a lot of comments here gushing about CC but I've used and I really don't get it. I find that it takes me just as long to explain to it what I need done as it takes to just do the work myself.
What's happening is that we are being bombarded by marketing on all fronts. These gushing statements are no different from the testimonials and advertorials from the days of yore.
It’s absolute lunacy to think everyone lauding Claude code is paid marketing/shilling.
What’s actually happening is there’s a divide being created between engineers that know how to use it, and engineers that don’t or want to convince themselves that it’s useless or whatever.
There is also a group of engineers who like to... engineer stuff? I really do enjoy writing codes by myself, it gives me dopamine. The reason I've learnt talking to machines is that I don't like talking to people, so I don't fancy talking to machines like they were human beings.
You can still do both. Its just all of the grunt work is no longer grunt work, and all the tech debt you've been putting off is no longer an issue, and all of the ideas you've been meaning to try out but don't have the time can suddenly be explored in an afternoon, and so on and so forth.
For new features, by all means code it by hand. Maybe that is best! But a codebase is much more than new features. Invaluable tool.
If you don't see how that fits into "group 2" in GP's comment even though it wasn't explicitly called out, then we may have identifed why you don't find agentic coding to be enjoyable.
That's true, I really don't enjoy expressing my ideas in natural language because I already see them as code in my head. So, what's the point of translating the code in my head to human language to produce the code? I can just write the code, lol. Vim shortcuts + two-hands typing and you are fast enough.
I already know like five of them, it's more than enough to write anything my weird brain comes up with :D. I'm fine with the setup I have now, if I ever would have to use agentic coding because my employer would demand doing things faster, for the pure sake of doing things faster, I will just quit. If everyone started demanding that, I will just say "goodbye" to my IT career for good because that wouldn't be fun anymore; yet another white collar job.
It's only about me having fun from coding. The low-level stuff is the most fun part. I don't know why is it so hard to swallow pill.
I think you might have identified where it would help you the most then.
So if your preference is to avoid high level stuff then genetic coding may be useful for, as an example, updating your suite of tests after a major refactoring. Or if you have no tests because that may not be your style, then generating some robust test scripts might be a good use case.
Or maybe you create one good test but you need to expand it with a lot of various alternative edge cases. Agents can generate the edge cases for you based on the test you already wrote.
Or writing high level plumbing like checking if the scopes are all correct still in your dependency injection scaffolding. Etc
It sounds like you’re highly defensive of the part of your job you like, which is commendable of course, but there may be opportunity to improve the parts you don’t like.
I don't believe anything I see online anymore. Payola is everywhere and people are happy to sell their professional souls for little more than likes and free LLM credits.
Deeper still is this: The group that openly relies on LLMs to code is likely the first group to be replaced by LLMs, since they've already identified the recipe that the organization needs to replace them.
More broadly, we live in an age where marketing is crucial to getting noticed, where good work alone is not sufficient and you have the perfect scenario for people to market themselves out of the workforce.
I think there's a lot of useful idiot bandwagon-ing going on. LLMs are clearly impressive, and nobody wants to be like the guy in 90's who said "ah, internet's just a fad," so everyone is overcorrecting and trying to pretend they're like the guy in the 80's who said "trust me bro this internet thing is gonna be big! Get in quick!"
But the internet took decades for people to get onboarded and figure out how to use. We're still figuring out how to use it in some ways. That's not to say the people should sleep on LLMs, but let's chill with the "Group 2 will not fare well in the coming months" nonsense. If anything group 1 is at a higher risk because they rely on others to set the trends they tell everyone else to catch up to.
There are also those who code in languages that are not the most popular, on operating systems that are not the most popular, or frameworks that are not the most popular.
I disagree. Given just how much money is being thrown at AI and the tone of the praise I think it's pretty likely that there are some large astroturf campaigns. Unfortunately the current generation is a lot worse at spotting misinformation.
