My comment is not directly responding to the essay, but it got me thinking about about how agentic programming is much more akin to management than it is to actual programming. Managers generally only have a high level idea of what ICs are working on and often don't have the time, bandwidth, and in some cases ability to understand everything the ICs they're supervising are doing. As more and more software gets written agentically the role of software engineer becomes less technical and more managerial.

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snarf21 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It feels to me like I'm stuck doing code reviews for a junior dev all day so I use it as little as possible and mostly to look for things I may have missed.

	▲	gwbas1c 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's great for "mechanical" changes. For example, yesterday I came across some unit tests that didn't have error messages in their assertions. Normally, it takes me ~10 minutes to fix a handful of tests in this situation. In this case, I gave a 2-3 sentence prompt, went to the bathroom, and reviewed the result after I washed my hands. Saved me a bunch of time! I encourage you to accept a feeling of "imposter syndrome" when using it, and keep trying new things with it. Don't feel like you have to be hands off, except when you're confident that you can be. (IE, if you think you need to spend 30+ minutes on mindless refactoring, see if you can explain it to an agent and then look at HN while it runs. You might get a good result, otherwise, it probably was time for a break anyway.) BTW: It's important to try different models. The Claude 5.0 models are slow and give me bad results, so I'm sticking with 4.x for now.
	▲	BatFastard an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Use the force Luke! I finally learned to let go of the code. I dont even run my C++ editor anymore. I run frequent code and architectural reviews. Its awesome.