Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

I committed to the fully agentic approach for a while. No code by hand! Setting aside the "capability" of the tools, I knew it was the wrong direction after a couple months or so in. I specifically remember during a large feature implementation running out of tokens for my 5 hour window or whatever, and I just couldn't continue on my own. Mostly due to laziness (I'll just wait till tomorrow when my limit resets!), but I also picked up on my first big whiff of skill rot / atrophy brewing, and that made feel uncomfortable. I just don't see this fully agentic approach going well long term. Talk about the ultimate dependency!! If the lights are "turned off" for whatever reason - outages, cost increases, or the agentic velocity finally reaches a complexity tipping point and you've lost control and understanding of your system to the point the agents are making things worse, whatever it is - do you really expect to be able to turn back the clock and step in to code at the productivity level and output you used to when you actually... wrote code?

> The bigger cost was the typing. Every time I wanted to build something, I could see the code in my head. I just couldn’t type it out fast enough. Facts. For me the bigger the gap between what i saw in my head and the speed with which my fingers could physically make it a reality the more stress i would feel and some marathon coding sessions would end w my back all messed up just from the tension

And before LLMs he would have slapped together a twenty-line bash script and a cron job over lunch, and spent six months working on something else.

How do people read these types of post with this AI flair, I couldn't read more than a couple sentences

Several comments here touch on the core problem: agents are writing more code than we can review. Seniors have never had enough time to review, and the prolific output from coding agents is making it worse. Moreover, the code is almost always good. So you're reviewing a tsunami of pretty good code, which means you get review fatigue and the whole thing just becomes theater. For me, this means the checks have to be more than just "I looked at it". There are two things that happen before I ever see it: first, as others have mentioned, I have a model from a different family review it with well-defined criteria. Same-family reviewers share bias, so it must be a different one. Second, I have a core set of deterministic gates (like lint, but also unit tests) that must run. In either case, failures go back to the coding agent. And only then do I bother. But I really don't read everything. If it is bog-standard CRUD operations, the agents are pretty good at that, especially if they are using mature packages. I focus on critical things, like how it enforces permissions. This works well for me, though it leaves one major issue untouched: whether this is worth building. The agents tend to be a bit overeager, so I have to do a lot of work up front to make sure the output will add value. The gates can only check the artifact, not my intent.