The four stages of AI-assisted coding

Reddit r/AI_Agents News

Summary

A reflection on the stages developers go through when adopting AI-assisted coding, from initial amazement to a balanced understanding, with concerns about how less experienced developers can learn to judge code quality when relying heavily on AI agents.

What I noticed in the past couple of months is that the people are typically going through several stages when they start working with the AI Agents. From amazement, to kind of realization that it's not all heaven. I also noticed that the more experienced the developer is, the faster they go through the stages to reach that “balanced” point at the end, where they know what the model is capable of and how to control the output so it's both good and working. (I'm talking here about the human-in-the-loop style of working... no vibe coding). It's because they already know, what the output should look like, I believe. What I'm a bit afraid of is the position of the less experienced developers, who cannot tell good code from bad code yet. They may have already hit the "reality check" stage while using agents, but they don't know how to get out of it, because they lack the experience... But how to get that experience when most of the code is written by an agent? Is it possible to get “a feeling” for well-written and maintainable code, when all you do is review code written by an agent? I've read plenty of books about software development, but still I think I got this feeling through writing hundreds of thousands of lines of code all by myself... but I'm not sure...
Original Article

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