In my career, I've had to write many code generation tools for many different reasons. Sometimes it's expanding C# generic boilerplate to cover between 1 and N generic parameters. Sometimes I'm porting code between languages. Sometimes it's a loop unroller or something more esoteric.

If I had to describe the way I feel about these tools, well, I don't. They're tools. They exist, briefly, to perform a function and then ascend to whatever plane lost and forgotten programs go to when they leave your hard drive.

I feel exactly the same way about AI agents. It's a tool. I put text in, computering happens, and code comes out. The amount of effort and complexity involved is different, but fundamentally I view it as the same boring codegen we've been doing for decades.

I highly suspect that because I treat AI agents this way, I get actually good, well-engineered results. I've seen extremely low rates of bad code, inappropriate solutions, or the general slop we see in vibecoded projects. I put in a great deal of engineering effort up front, and I get engineering out.

That some people find this loop addictive is... incredibly disturbing. I only foresee very bad things coming from this.