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Comment by ma2kx | Hacker News Reader

It's the same with any tool. You can buy the most expensive drill but if its used by an inexperienced worker, the only result will be more wrong drilled holes.

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Charitably, we could say that “agentic” software engineering is less than 4 years old. I say charitably because I think even that’s an extraordinary stretch. But even at 4 years, I don’t think anybody can fairly claim to be experienced in it in a way that’s going to be stable and fungible for, say, the next 30 years.

(My experience has been the polar opposite: the people I know who are the most “AI pilled” are also the ones who have the shortest technical horizons in terms of how transferable they expect their LLM skills to be.)

True, but thats explains why the gap is so huge at the moment. There are some experienced (in coding) devs with a talent in using agent, inexperienced devs with talent, experienced devs without talent and inexperienced devs without talent. And I don't mean talent in a judgmental sense; it's perfectly normal for people to have different aptitudes, and we simply weren't prepared for using computers in a natural language.

The fact that there are currently hardly any established methods, and that the combination of all the LLMs, harnesses, MCP servers, etc., results in extremely different experiences, and that nobody really has a comprehensive overview, only exacerbates the situation.

I agree. It remains to be seen whether the field will even stabilize, beyond some local maxima of everything being a chat interface. I for one hope it does.

In my feeling, it is decades old. With LLMs and agentic coding, it's deja vu of some 200x working with with inexperienced offshore teams. The same misunderstanding problems, the same corners cut, the same attempts to present bullshit as a "production ready", and the same "Yes, Sir, you are absolutely right" answer to criticue.

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