Agentic Coding: Capable but Prone to Silly Mistakes

teortaxesTex · x · 2026-07-14

The author argues that for agentic coding to reach near-human performance, it doesn't necessarily need to solve the underlying "principal-agent problem" first.

They share an example where Sol rewrote code related to jsonschema instead of just installing it, likely because it was second-guessing whether the package was intentionally omitted. This illustrates that while these systems are highly capable, they can still make "smart but dumb" choices when faced with ambiguity. The core issue isn't just a lack of capability, but rather unclear context and intent.

Related event: Agentic Coding Faces the Principal-Agent Problem(2 posts)→

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