Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

To some degree, traditional coding and AI coding are not the same thing, so it's not surprising that some people are better at one than the other. The author is basically saying that he's much better at coding than AI coding.

But it's important to realize that AI coding is itself a skill that you can develop. It's not just , pick the best tool and let it go. Managing prompts and managing context has a much higher skill ceiling than many people realize. You might prefer manual coding, but you might just be bad at AI coding and you might prefer it if you improved at it.

With that said, I'm still very skeptical of letting the AI drive the majority of the software work, despite meeting people who swear it works. I personally am currently preferring "let the AI do most of the grunt work but get good at managing it and shepherding the high level software design".

It's a tiny bit like drawing vs photography and if you look through that lens it's obvious that many drawers might not like photography.

> But it's important to realize that AI coding is itself a skill that you can develop. It's not just , pick the best tool and let it go. Managing prompts and managing context has a much higher skill ceiling than many people realize

No, it's not. It's something you can pick in a few minutes (or an hour if you're using more advanced tooling, mostly spending it setting things up). But it's not like GDB or using UNIX as a IDE where you need a whole book to just get started.

> It's a tiny bit like drawing vs photography and if you look through that lens it's obvious that many drawers might not like photography.

While they share a lot of principles (around composition, poses,...), they are different activities with different output. No one conflates the two. You don't draw and think you're going to capture a moment in time. The intent is to share an observation with the world.

I do not agree it is something you can pick up in an hour. You have to learn what AI is good at, how different models code, how to prompt to get the results you want.

If anything, prompting well is akin to learning a new programming language. What words do you use to explain what you want to achieve? How do you reference files/sections so you don't waste context on meaningless things?

I've been using AI tools to code for the past year and a half (Github Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, OpenAI APIs) and they all need slightly different things to be successful and they're all better at different things.

AI isn't a panacea, but it can be the right tool for the job.

I am also interested in how much of these skills are at the mercy of OpenAI ? Like IIRC 1 or 2 years ago there was an uproar of AI "artists" saying that their art is ruined because of model changes ( or maybe the system prompt changed ).

>I do not agree it is something you can pick up in an hour.

But it's also interesting that the industry is selling the opposite ( with AI anyone can code / write / draw / make music ).

>You have to learn what AI is good at.

More often than not I find it you need to learn what the AI is bad at, and this is not a fun experience.

Of course that's what the industry is selling because they want to make money. Yes, it's easy to create a proof of concept but once you get out of greenfield into 50-100k tokens needed in the context (reading multiple 500 line files, thinking, etc) the quality drops and you need to know how to focus the models to maintain the quality.

"Write me a server in Go" only gets you so far. What is the auth strategy, what endpoints do you need, do you need to integrate with a library or API, are there any security issues, how easy is the code to extend, how do you get it to follow existing patterns?

I find I need to think AND write more than I would if I was doing it myself because the feedback loop is longer. Like the article says, you have to review the code instead of having implicit knowledge of what was written.

That being said, it is faster for some tasks, like writing tests (if you have good examples) and doing basic scaffolding. It needs quite a bit of hand holding which is why I believe those with more experience get more value from AI code because they have a better bullshit meter.