@omarsar0: Every time I ask my 10-year-old to use coding agents, he gets extremely disappointed. It turns out that all he wants is…
Summary
A developer notes that coding agents consistently fail to help his 10-year-old build creative simulators, revealing LLMs' inability to handle out-of-distribution use cases and arguing that claims of imminent AGI are overstated.
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Cached at: 05/19/26, 02:41 AM
Every time I ask my 10-year-old to use coding agents, he gets extremely disappointed.
It turns out that all he wants is to build his own rocket simulator.
No amount of context engineering helps. No model works. All coding agents fail.
That’s just one example. He has many use cases where the coding agent really suck. Learning apps and other types of science-centered simulators.
It’s not like he is trying to be adversarial or break the system. I use the coding agents so extensively in my codebases that I just assumed that he would get similar results. It’s not the case. And I think this is happening across all kinds of domains.
I know he is not the target user. I get all that. But if all these claims about superintelligent AI on the horizon (12-18 months) are right, then coding agents shouldn’t struggle so much to build any of the things he wants.
The reality is that coding agents can help maintain and build complex things that aim to extend what exists in abundance in the training data. No surprises there. There is plenty of AI research to explain the OOD issues with LLMs.
I think there is a massive opportunity here. Potentially a more generalized harness (something I have been working on). It doesn’t have to work super well now, but it tests on edge use cases as newer models and capabilities emerge.
IMO, all of this is a good indicator that LLMs are nowhere close to AGI or whatever they call it these days. Every day that passes, I am more convinced that we need to quickly move beyond LLMs and into things like native multi-modal systems and world models.
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