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I've inherited plenty of code bases. AI generated code is a special kind of foobar. With a code base inherited from a human you can at least be assured at least one human has understood each portion for a brief period. With agentic slop all bets are off.

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Maybe I'm a bad programmer or have worked at places with terrible dev culture, but honestly I've made changes to code I didn't really understand. The changes I made seemed to accomplish the task I was aiming at, but the downstream effects were sometimes impossible for me to grok. Before vibe coding took over, using AI to help me get a handle on what a bunch of code was doing was actually one of the things that sold me on using AI.

Yeah, I think AI is a great tool to get a handle on a codebase so you understand it. It's just a much more difficult task when that code is AI generated. I don't think agentic coding is worth all the overhead and complexity. Honestly think that as human understanding is prioritized agentic coding will decline. But I don't think human understanding will be prioritized until we see some major crash and burns with agentic.

That's as good a guess about the future as any I suppose! Personally I'd give that about a 30% chance of happening in a large way. For small systems though I don't think I could ever personally go back to the old way. And maybe we should be composing small systems anyway...

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