The Code-Only Agent

I expect that the following is going to get worse before it gets better.

Many of us got hit by the agent coding addiction. It feels good, we barely sleep, we build amazing things. Every once in a while that interaction involves other humans, and all of a sudden we get a reality check that maybe we overdid it. The most obvious example of this is the massive degradation of quality of issue reports and pull requests. As a maintainer many PRs now look like an insult to one's time, but when one pushes back, the other person does not see what they did wrong. They thought they helped and contributed and get agitated when you close it down.

I often feel like this as well. I think however that the truth is that what we now consider code quality isn't as important as we think it is.

Or maybe some of us are genuinely losing the plot, and we won't know which camp we're in until we look back. All I know is that when I watch someone at 3am, running their tenth parallel agent session, telling me they've never been more productive — in that moment I don't see productivity. I see someone who might need to step away from the machine for a bit. And I wonder how often that someone is me.

I'm more worried about the need to step away from the computer. Not because of the code quality issue but more from the addiction part of it. So far there is always some new feature, some new tool or some new idea. The kind of thought process it takes to dream up what to do is less daunting than writing the code by hand. I personally have to make myself stop. I don't really get worn out working this way. I get sleepy.