I use AI a lot to build new features quickly and to help me start tasks I’ve been procrastinating on. It definitely makes me faster in the short term. However, the code quality is often not as good as I expected.
When we code manually, we usually put more thought and care into the solution. We try to be creative, look for the simplest or most performant approach, and also think about readability and maintainability for future developers (including ourselves). AI agents don’t really have that same sense of ownership.
This month, I’ve been experimenting with a “don’t code manually” approach. While I feel faster in the present, I also feel slower in the near future. Sometimes I feel like a new developer with only general context: I don’t fully understand how certain parts work, the reasoning behind some decisions, or even where specific code is located. When an issue appears or someone asks me about something, I often need to re-explore the codebase from scratch.
After writing this messy comment, I decided to try an experiment: I’m going to disable the AI features in VSCode, start a new project from scratch (which is actually one of my tasks for today at work), and continue developing it manually for the next 2–3 weeks. After that, I want to compare the experience and results so I can refine my strategy for working with AI coding agents.
This is actually a super interesting experiment 😄 Please come back later and let us know how it went!
What you describe resonates with me a lot. Coding agents are amazing at helping you start quickly, but if you don’t control them carefully enough (which often eats most of the “saved” time anyway 😂), the chaos can grow surprisingly fast.
Unfortunately I can’t really run the same experiment myself 😅 At work, I’m nowhere near doing 100% agentic development anyway, and in hobby projects… I usually don’t have enough free time to intentionally slow myself down that much 😂
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I use AI a lot to build new features quickly and to help me start tasks I’ve been procrastinating on. It definitely makes me faster in the short term. However, the code quality is often not as good as I expected.
When we code manually, we usually put more thought and care into the solution. We try to be creative, look for the simplest or most performant approach, and also think about readability and maintainability for future developers (including ourselves). AI agents don’t really have that same sense of ownership.
This month, I’ve been experimenting with a “don’t code manually” approach. While I feel faster in the present, I also feel slower in the near future. Sometimes I feel like a new developer with only general context: I don’t fully understand how certain parts work, the reasoning behind some decisions, or even where specific code is located. When an issue appears or someone asks me about something, I often need to re-explore the codebase from scratch.
After writing this messy comment, I decided to try an experiment: I’m going to disable the AI features in VSCode, start a new project from scratch (which is actually one of my tasks for today at work), and continue developing it manually for the next 2–3 weeks. After that, I want to compare the experience and results so I can refine my strategy for working with AI coding agents.
(comment refined by ChatGPT 🤭)
This is actually a super interesting experiment 😄 Please come back later and let us know how it went!
What you describe resonates with me a lot. Coding agents are amazing at helping you start quickly, but if you don’t control them carefully enough (which often eats most of the “saved” time anyway 😂), the chaos can grow surprisingly fast.
Unfortunately I can’t really run the same experiment myself 😅 At work, I’m nowhere near doing 100% agentic development anyway, and in hobby projects… I usually don’t have enough free time to intentionally slow myself down that much 😂