Agentic Addiction

Exurbia once said "Chess is a taste of the infinite!". I think we have a serious contender with vibe coding.

First coined by Andrej Karpathy, vibe coding is the perfect combination of getting shit done and not sure how or if it get's it done like a slot machine.

When GPT first came on the scene, all my friends seemed to prefer it and use it for coding, even if they had to copy paste back and forth between the chatbot and their IDE. I didn't think much of it cause it took same amount of time for me to explain my problem to ChatGPT and working on it my self. All this would change with the introduction of "AGENTIC" coding.

When I first heard that word, I legit imagined 2 men from MIB, maybe agent J, taking over my computer and coding it for me. Not gonna lie, sometimes it does feel like that. The unfortunate news, however, is agent J is on crack most of the time and he might just delete your entire repo or implement a neat back door while he's developing your one true sass that'll make you get accepted by Y Combinator.

I admit, coding agents have been getting better, and we've been "more productive" using them. My biggest concern used to be the rate at which we're creating new bugs as much as we're creating new features. But now, what scares me is people's addiction to these chatbots and coding agents.

In my day job, I do technical recruiting. I've had the privilege to interview tons of senior engineers in so many fields. It still partially gives me hope that humanity still have people that know how compilers are built or the preverbal centering of the 'div'. At the same time, I find candidates with all the right experience and knowledge, crippled by their overuse of AI Agents that they forgot how to do basic things in their specialization. I'm not even talking about someone that was just fresh out of uni. No, he had 12 years working in his field and using the LLMs for about a year and a half, and he couldn't code by hand. Imagine your CTO, the person you look up to for technical direction and guidance, getting his instructions from Agent J on crack.

Unfortunately, that's not even my biggest concern. You can always learn the skills back. It's like riding a bicycle. What's got me typing at my computer at this un-Godly hour is people's addiction on it.

We engineers are very simple creatures. We have a logical brain, we see a problem, we fix said problem, and we get our dopamine hit. Even better when that solution impacts other people as well. The bigger the perceived impact, the higher we get! LLMs give us the opportunity to do this at 10x the speed. This means our iteration speed is so small, you can get from idea to prototype or even shipped feature in less than 15 min. That cycle alone starts creating FOMO, starts making you think about the time your wasting not being productive. If you have multiple paid, or unpaid, accounts for vibe coding, or bring your laptop to bed, you're already slipping.

For whatever reason, companies are obsessed with measuring productivity with lines of code. What they're failing, or ignoring, to understand is the more code you have, the more ways your app can break and your customers unfulfilled. We seem to be forgetting that we were coding to solve a problem, to provide a service, not to compete with each other on who can burn tokens the fastest. The literal definition of a business is an entity that provides a solution to a customer's need at a price that is above the cost of production. What we're starting to forget, especially in our community, is an app by it's self is not a business. Now matter you think you can do this by your self, no matter you think it's you and Claude against the world, you'll run into real world problems that'll require you to do something else than speaking to a chatbot and pressing enter. I hope it works out for you, I really do. I also don't want you to experience the rude awakening that is starting and running the business.

You might be thinking, why on earth are you writing this. I can also ask you why you're still reading...

I want people to understand that this fancy slot machine of an auto-complete is a very powerful tool. The moment you think is anything beyond a tool, however, then you'll be cooked. Your product can't be unique if you don't have taste, or opinions on how something should be implemented. That "taste" comes from actually doing things, shipping products, working in large teams delivering value to customers. The real world is always different than the version of it in our heads.

The other sad thing is that if everyone is using the same LLMs to make the next generation products, they're all going to be the same. It still takes almost as much effort to make a product polished enough and unique enough for use when building it with an LLM as by hand. ChatGPT or Claude is not going to build you a $1M app. You're still the one that's building the $1M app. The difference now is you have to know the combination of words to tell Agent J.

Your value is not just in what you built, it's in you. A true engineer will always be able to solve problems. A true business man will always be able to sell the solution and make a profit. The LLM is not what makes you an engineer, you make your self an engineer.

In the words of Iron Man in 'Spider Man - Homecoming', "If you're nothing with out the suit, you shouldn't have it".