Thank you for this post. It provides me with some modicum of relief when I read the opinions of software engineers who have not lost their minds over AI.
I have really given agentic coding a solid shot, and I keep coming back to the same two thoughts:
- This is not enjoyable. It's impossible to get into any kind of flow (if you think you are flowing with agentic coding, you don't understand flow states) and, other than articulating what I want to achieve, I'm neither building nor utilizing any skills (as you pointed out I'm in fact slowly losing my skill).
- For anything of novel and/or complex, I SWEAR this is not faster than manual coding; all the tactics suggested to get even remotely close to production code (even setting quality aside) seem to take so much time and effort that you might as well have written the code to begin with.
There are things about AI that I genuinely like, but it's also incredibly frustrating, and all the issues you point out seem spot-on.
Being real: I still want to find a way to leverage it in the right places while still coding manually.