If you are good at code review, you will be good at using AI agents

This. Having had the pleasure to review the work and fix the bugs of agent jockeys (generally capable developers that fell in love with Claude Code et al), I'm rather sceptical. The code often looks as if they were on mushrooms. They cannot reason about it whatsoever, like they weren't even involved, when I know they weren't completely hands off.

I really believe there are people out there that produce good code with these things, but all I've seen so far has been tragic.

Luckily, I've witnessed a few snap out of it and care again. Literally looks to me as if they had a substance abuse problem for a couple of months.

If you take a critical look at what comes out of contemporary agentic workflows, I think the conclusion must be that it's not there. So yeah, if you're a good reviewer, you would perhaps come to that conclusion much sooner.

>The code often looks as if they were on mushrooms. They cannot reason about it whatsoever

Interesting comparison, why not weed or alcohol?

> I really believe there are people out there that produce good code with these things, but all I've seen so far has been tragic

I don't believe this at all, because all I've seen so far is tragic

I would need to see any evidence of good quality work coming from AI assisted devs before I start to entertain the idea myself. So far all I see is low effort low quality code that the dev themself is unable to reason about

Yeah.

I'm not even anti-LM. Little things—research, "write TS types for this object", search my codebase, go figure out exactly what line in the Django rest framework is causing this weird behavior, —are working great and saving me an hour here and 15m there.

It's really obvious when people lean on it, because they don't act like a beginner (trying things that might not work) or just being sloppy (where there's a logic ot it but there's no attention to detail), but it's like they copy pasted from Stackoverflow search results at random and there are pieces that might belong but the totality is incoherent.

Yeah, it gets so wild, downright psychedelic.

I'm definitely not anti LLM, I use them all the time. Just not for generating code. I give it a go every couple of months, probably wasting more time on it than I should. I don't think I've felt any real advancements since last year around this time, and this agentic hype seems to be a bit ahead of its time, to put it mildly. But I absolutely get a lot of value out of them.

Never tried psychedelic mushrooms, so that part is speculation. But no amount of weed or alcohol could get me even close to writing code that unhinged.

It's also nice for handling some little tasks that otherwise would have been just annoying enough for me to not do it. Small 5 or 6 line functions that I would have had to fiddle with for far longer to get right.

Totally. I have to watch it like a hawk though. I've had it get the logic backwards on trivial "copy paste this from from the docs" functions.

Oh yeah. Just this week I had it hallucinate random non-existent API calls and completely bungle fairly straightforward arguments.