I did a bit of digging into why you think agentic coding is “not there yet”, and I think you are bashing a tool you have very little experience with and are using a bit wrongly.
Nothing wrong with that, except that as opposed to any other tool that is out there, agentic coding is approached by smart senior engineers that would otherwise spend time reading documentation and understanding a new package/tool/framework before giving conclusions around it with “I spun up Claude code and it’s not working”. Dunno why the same level of diligence isn’t applied to agentic coding as well.
First question that I always have to such engineers is “what model have you tried?” And it always ends up being the non-SOTA models for tasks that are not simple. Have you tried Claude Opus?
Second question: have you tried plan mode?
And then I politely ask them to read some documentation on using these tools, because the simplicity of the chat interface is deceptive.
Definitely didn't want to imply that the author is a bad engineer, quite the contrary he seems like a very good one. Apologies if it came across that way.
Just that many brilliant engineers as themselves test agentic tools without the same level of thorough understanding that they give to other software engineering tools that they test out.
It doesn't look like you addressed issues raised in the article. E.g., see the "my experiences interviewing candidates" section where we can see this isn't just a problem of the author's (just one example in one section of an article that covers various things).
I always wonder what the purpose of posting these generic, superficial defenses of a certain form of LLM-based coding is?
That was a different matter altogether. I agree though that I didn't touch on that.
My experience is different in that case, but it certainly depends on the type of technical challenge, the programming language, etc.
Candidates that perform better or worse exist with and without agentic coding tools. I've had positive and negative experience on both fronts, so I'd attribute the OP's experience to the N=1 problem, and perhaps to the model's jagged intelligence.
I work mostly in Typescript, and it's well known that models are particulary well versed in it. I know that other programming languages are less supported because the training data for them is lower, in which case models could be worse with them across the board (or some SOTA models could be better than others)
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