my qualms with agentic coding
context: I am a new grad swe at a relatively large corporation
In sixth grade, I decided that being a professional coder was what I wanted to do. The idea of my hands across a keyboard crafting beautiful lines of code at a dizzying speed was enticing to me. Being able to write a collection of code blocks and orchestrate them together into a intricate software was the main driver to pursue software engineering when I was a kid. As I went through high school, I did programming in my robotics club and side projects, but still I craved to learn from experienced mentors with years of experience on me. What sort of programming skills did they have?
Then I entered college and I blazed through the introduction programming courses and finally started on more theoretical and low level programming. Then toward the end of my assembly language class, ChatGPT dropped. Thankfully, it was still quite terrible at the time, and I looked it with whimsy. The tool was fun to play with, but it wasn't any help with my homework.
AI-assisted programming mainly consisted of auto-complete and most definitely augmented people with developed programming skills allowing them to write code slightly faster, but all the craft was still there. I went through an internship at a small mutual fund company and during that time I was able to use rudimentary coding agents, since we were encouraged to use the tools we had. This was fine since I only used it on front-end coding tasks which I was not that interested in.
Then, I graduated college and ended up at my full time job. Of course, this was exciting, I was finally a professional coder! However, I quickly realized being a "coder" does not exist anymore. Driven to use agentic coding, I was able to get ramped up more quickly and do more tasks much faster than if I had to manually code. The flip side is that I will never obtain the craft and skills I dreamed of. Even if full agentic coding does not last, it will never be the same.
Agentic coding tools has reduced me to a professional Jira completer.
And that is devastating.