to throw my hat into the ring, I am in no way shy about using the AI tooling and I like using it, but I am happy we're finally seeing people talk about AI that matches with my personal reality with the tools.

for the record, I've been bullish on the tooling from the beginning

My dev-tooling AI journey has been chatGPT -> vscode + copilot -> early cursor adopter -> early claude + cursor adopter -> cursor agent with claude -> and now claude code

I've also spent a lot of time trying out self-hosted LLMs such as couple version of Qwen coder 2.5/3 32B, as well as deepseek 30B - and talking to them through the vscode continue.dev extension

My personal feelings are that the AI coding/tooling industry has seen a major plateau in usefulness as soon as agents became apart of the tooling. The reality is coding is a highly precise task, and LLMs down to the very core of the model architecture are not precise in the way coding needs them to be. and it's not that I don't think we won't one day see coding agents, but I think it will take a deep and complete bottom up kind of change and an possibly an entirely new model architecture to get us to what people imagine a coding agent is

I've accepted to just use claude w/ cursor and to be done with experimenting. the agent tooling just slows my engineering team down

I think the worst part about this dev tooling space is the comment sections on these kinds of articles is completely useless. it's either AI hype bots just saying non-sense, or the most mid an obvious takes that you here everywhere else. I've genuinely have become frustrated with all this vague advice and how the AI dev community talks about this domain space. there is no science, data, or reason as to why these things fail or how to improve it

I think anyone who tries to take this domain space seriously knows that there's limit to all this tooling, we're probably not going to see anything group breaking for a while, and there doesn't exist a person, outside the AI researchers at the the big AI companies, that could tell ya how to actually improve the performance of a coding agent

I think that famous vibe-code reddit post said it best

"what's the point of using these tools if I still need a software engineer to actually build it when I'm done prototyping"