4 karma · joined January 30, 2026
I think he’s soured a bit on the 10x claim echoing many of the quality concerns expressed by others in this thread: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/agent-psychosis/
I’ve spent the last week unwinding my coworkers slop who said the same thing.
1. You know exactly what the code should look like ahead of time. Agents are handy here, but this is rare and takes no time at all as is
2. You don’t know exactly what it should be. Building the mental model by hand is faster than working backwards from finished work. Agents help with speeding up your knowledge here, but having them build the model is not good
Code review is and always was the bottle neck. You are doing code review when you write code.
This has been the big one for me. Of all the best devs I know, only one is really big on AI, but he’s also the one that spent years in a relational database without knowing what isolation levels are. He was absolutely a “greenfield” kinda dev - which he was great at, tons of ideas but not big on the small stuff.
The rest use them judiciously and see a lot of value, but reading and understanding code is still the bottleneck. And reviewing massive PRs is not efficient.