We’re making a fundamental tradeoff when we use these coding agents, but some of my engineering friends still don’t seem to get it. I see a lot of engineers make the argument “AI outputs still aren’t that great, code quality isn’t the same as writing it by hand.” And it’s all true, their argument is not wrong. But a coding agent can produce in a few hours what would take one of these engineers a month, or more. And I’ll even accept at face value that their well-thought-out, carefully written “artisanal code” would be better. But it would take them 10x longer to get out. So the fundamental thing we’re doing is to take this average code, generated in a day by an LLM, and try to make it a little above average. We are prompting our way onto something we can stand behind and support. And even if that extra work takes let’s say a week & it’s frustrating as hell to get it to something we can stand behind, a week is still better than spending a month or more. So that’s the tradeoff. And if you write code for money, pretty soon, nobody is going to let you take a month to write it carefully. Businesses all exist in a competitive space, if other businesses find a way to move faster by willingly making this tradeoff, they’ll all be forced to work this way. And it’s already happening and it will continue to happen. Then on top of all this, I notice many of us have this old mental model that we are writing code for other humans to extend, to work with, to add features to, etc. And in that world code quality matters a lot. But it’s unclear to me now that other humans will ever extend your code again. If these models improve even a little bit more, models will always be extending your code from now on. In that new world, you have to almost always make this tradeoff and you have to become great at it.