Comment by cwoolfe
I'm a technical co-founder rapidly building a software product. I've been coding since 2006. We have every incentive to have AI just build our product. But it can't. I keep trying to get it to...but it can't. Oh, it tries, but the code it writes is often overly complex and overly-verbose. I started out being amazed at the way it could solve problems, but that's because I gave it small, bounded, well-defined problems. But as expectations with agentic coding rose, I gave it more abstract problems and it quickly hit the ceiling. As was said, the engineering task is identifying the problem and decomposing it. I'd love to hear from someone who's used agentic coding with more success. So far I've tried Co-pilot, Windsurf, and Alex sidebar for Xcode projects. The most success I have is via a direct question with details to Gemini in the browser, usually a variant of "write a function to do X"
> As was said, the engineering task is identifying the problem and decomposing it.
In my experience if you do this and break the problem down into small pieces, the AI can implement the pieces for you.
It can save a lot of time typing and googling for docs.
That said, once the result exceeds a certain level of complexity, you can't really ask it to implement changes to existing code anymore, since it stops understanding it.
At which point you now have to do it yourself, but you know the codebase less well than if you'd hand written it.
So, my upshot is so far that it works great for small projects and for prototyping, but the gain after a certain level of complexity is probably quite small.
But then, I've also find quite some value in using it as a code search engine and to answer questions about the code, so maybe if nothing else that would be where the benefit comes from.