AI Coding agents are the opposite of what I want
I've been thinking a lot about LLM assisted development, and in particular why I keep dropping the available tools after a few attempts at using them.
I realized recently that it's taking away the part of software development I enjoy: the creative problem solving that comes with writing code. What's left is code review tasks, testing, security checks, etc. Important tasks, but they all primarily involve heavy concentration, and much less creativity.
Why aren't agents focused on handling the mundane tasks instead? Tell me if I've just introduced a security vulnerability or a runtime bug. Generate realistic test data and give me info on what the likely output would be. Tell me that the algorithm I just wrote is O(n^2).
Those tasks are so much more applicable to matching against existing data, something LLMs should be extremely good at, rather than trying to get them to write something novel, which so far they've been mostly bad at, at least in my experience.
They are? Those all exist.
Personally I’m of the opposite opinion. The current suite of LLM tooling allows me to do the fun part - designing and thinking of systems - and skip the boring minutia.
The fun part of programming is analyzing a problem realizing, oh, this is a perfect opportunity for a bloom filter, or, I should represent this as a finite state machine, or, this can be formatted as a monad.
What’s not fun is mucking around with dagger or autovalue or writing out boilerplate value classes or figuring out which of 7 different mocking libraries is used conventionally.
You still do the former, you don’t have to do the latter.
One fun thing Claude and like have unlocked is that I’m back to writing code in vim. I essentially just bang out code, without worrying about syntax errors in moment, since Claude can fix those afterwards. I can also do things like add a comment and tell Claude to do some common boilerplate (for instance, error propagation in go, or telling it to catch all checked exceptions, log the exception and throw a wrapper exception). It’s fun, and nice to not have to deal with bulky IDEs.
I strongly enjoy designing things more rapidly than I might be able to without LLMs.
A little bit of a rant, but I thought it worth writing out this thought and seeing what other people think.
Wanted to reply and let you know, against the sea of voices who enjoy these tools and insist you're using them wrong, that you're not alone.
I see it in friends who are forced to use tokens for their job, who I regard as competent engineers that care about the quality of what they produce. Forced to use LLMs which are producing homogeneous, bland paste that is "good enough". Sitting there for ten minutes watching it have a conversation with itself because that's how someone jury-rigged the probabilistic word generator to produce something approaching correct.
I'm sure there are people who are enjoying being able to focus on higher-level architectural systems, or those who found the writing code bit to be one of the least interesting parts of their jobs. But even as someone who enjoys solving people's problems and views code as a means to an end, the creativity of using code to solve those problems is one of the parts I enjoy the most. Communicating through my code, to other developers, to myself in the future.
Anyway yeah, LLMs suck all the fun out of my job and I'm not sure why more people don't care.
Yeesh - sorry to hear that. Genuinely.
My POV:
I can't say I love the experience of driving all of my development through Claude on a daily basis. But it's kinda what I have to do right now to continue to say abreast of the times.
Professionally, I only have to stay current for a certain period of time: until I am financially independent.
While I love to write code, and I love to plumb distinct systems together into an emergent solution, I have come to the conclusion I mostly like a pay check.
Once I have enough funds to cover my needs for my future, I will stop peddling my labor for a salary. At that point, I'll happily use LLMs in the way that make me happiest during the pursuit of my hobbyist passion of development.
Until then? I'm not writing code for much of a reason other than to pay my mortgage.
Are you using a tool that limits what you can ask for? At a prompt, I can ask the coding agent to do whatever task I want.
What "agent harness" software do you use? (Claude Code, OpenCode, Codex, etc.)