Comment by ekidd

> I'm so curious around what people's median experience is of AI coding tools.

My experience is coding agents work best for either absolute beginners, or for lead engineers who have experience building and training teams. Getting good results out of coding agents is a lot like getting good results out of interns: You need to explain clearly what you want, ask them to explain what they plan to do, give feedback on the plan, and then very carefully review the results. You need to write up your preferred coding style, you need a document that explains "how to work on this project", you need to establish rigorous automated quality checks, etc. Using a coding agent heavily is a lot like being promoted to "technical lead", with all the tradeoffs that entails.

Here's a recent discussion of a good blog post on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45503867

I have gotten some very nice results out of Sonnet 4.5 this past week. But it required using my "technical management" skills very heavily. And it required lots extremely careful code review. Clear documentation, robust QA, and code review are the main bottlenecks.

I mean, the time I spent writing AGENTS.md wasn't wasted. I'm writing down a lot of stuff I used to teach in pairing sessions.