What a hellscape we've created for ourselves. My job is to get out of the way of an AI agent? People were writing bad code before, but at least they were looking at it. It is very difficult to judge whether the code AI spits out is correct or not. My job is to write correct code, and I'm not at all convinced that's easier with an AI. It's a lot easier to write correct code myself than to catch every subtle bug introduced by an AI. I cannot even imagine how awful it's going to be to try to maintain systems that are written like this in the future. And no, Claude is not going to be able to do it for you.
I was handed a project someone vibe coded with Claude and it took me hours just to get it running to discover it was missing the entire interface and all the queries were for sqlite while the DB to setup for it was mysql. The patch diff file between what claude produced and the functional version I got working was over 11k lines
I read and understand the code using my brain, by constructing a mental model and reasoning about it. An AI can't do this because they don't have mental models and don't do reasoning.
I seriously thought this was a joke the first time I read it. Are people really able to work like this, understanding nothing and just poking the machine until it does your job for you?
Most of the time, the agent should be able to run the code and observe the errors for itself, but there are exceptions. For instance, I've had agents write code that's used to process data which, by company policy, can't be exposed to cloud services (confidential customer communications, etc.), a prohibition that includes cloud-hosted LLMs. When that blows up, I've had to give it a bug report -- what I do then to avoid excessive back-and-forth is to package it up well enough that the bot can reproduce the failure on sanitized excerpts and produce a fix autonomously using that.
This is bad advice in 2026 for most people who would read it, since it advises taking a terrible security posture (give the agent access to everything,) in exchange for a relatively small improvement in workflows.
I say small improvement because my experience is that modern Agents are pretty good, so by the time they've handed it back to me to test it, there are usually only one or two remaining issues that I'll discover as we roll it out to Production.
> It's the most gloriously fast engineering experience humanity has ever created.
Someone drank the kool-aid.
> It reminds me of the doctor I saw last week at the medical clinic who spends 10% of his time diagnosing the patient and the other 90% stabbing his keyboard - one key at a time - for 10 minutes, only to write 3 sentences.
I say small improvement because my experience is that modern Agents are pretty good, so by the time they've handed it back to me to test it, there are usually only one or two remaining issues that I'll discover as we roll it out to Production.
Someone drank the kool-aid.
> It reminds me of the doctor I saw last week at the medical clinic who spends 10% of his time diagnosing the patient and the other 90% stabbing his keyboard - one key at a time - for 10 minutes, only to write 3 sentences.
Correction: a pompous asshole drank the kool-aid.