I thought the sales pitch of all of this is that the AI was supposed to relieve people from having to do a bunch of annoying bootstrap coding and to do it in a way that we could extended easily.

I have a subscription to Claude Code and despite my skepticism, it has been pretty good at just getting a goofy PoC thing going. When I look at the code, it’s usually insane unless the prompt was so narrow and specific like about writing a function that does one thing and only one thing.

Outside of small, personal projects, I am still really uncomfortable at having agents run wild. I see the result, and then I spend a bunch of time having to gain the context of what is going on, especially if I ask it to implement features in spaces I have general knowledge, but not expertise. So, the problem remains the same. These things still need handholding by people who understand the domain, but having people become glorified PR reviewers is not an acceptable path forward.

Arguing that there is lots of bad production code kinda avoids the actual issue that is going on here. Yes, a lot of sloppy code can and has been written by people. I’ve seen it myself, but it feels like the actual thing is that, we are now enabling that at scale and calling it “abundance” when instead we are really generating an abundance of completely avoidable security holes and logic errors.