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I was pairing with a dev who commented on the fact that I always resolved merge conflicts by hand versus using a UI. I joked that it's because I'm a control freak and without missing a beat responded "Yup." 😅 Let me tell you about my experiences with agentic coding these last 3 months...

So this role I'm in now was a tiny 2 person team. Two senior ICs managing a family (50~) of APIs and libraries for that last decade. These services are providing a public interface for data produced from various sources (integrations, dev teams, jobs) back out to dev teams to work with.

Those two senior level ICs both retired at the same time. They were an all knowing, doing a lot of "hidden" work to keep things going and it was a complete silo. When I applied for the role, I missed the part about it being an AI "augmented" role. I noticed an hour before first the interview.

At this point I had used LLMs to explore implementation ideas at a small scale. My first attempt implementing Ackermann steering for a video game. It was a single function that I reviewed and integrated into the game. It worked.

Play testing was instant so having hands on the wheel was easy. But this was a well known algorithm. No heavy lifting here at all but that work flow of a tiny piece, rigorously reviewed and tested felt ok to me. Ok enough to see there might be use here.

That's how my AI uses with coding went for a few months up to, or to explore why code I wrote didn't work the way I expected. I didn't trust anything it said but it would atleast give me starting points.

I was clear to me any AI usage during development was best, for me, when it's tiny and focused. When it was drudge work, not design work. For me telling it how to build worked better than what to build. I still feel this way...

I mentioned being a control freak when it comes to dev & honestly its less about control and more about understanding the systems at work. That is a direct factor in my enjoyment with coding. Analyzing the problem, designing a solution, and iterating. Vibe coding does not check that box for me.

I have to have hands at the wheel at all times. I care how something is implemented, even if the promise of AI exceeded our expectations. The idea of software being a blackbox is absurdist. Have you worked in enterprise software before? We tried speccing out behavior with gherkin already... Come on