Coding agents write code faster, but debugging them is stranger and more tedious
tengyanAI · x · 2026-09-16
Developer tengyanAI vents about a new pain point: coding agents have made writing code dramatically faster, but fixing problems has become stranger and more tedious.
Key observation: you can spend hours prompting and steering the AI toward the right output, only to discover the root cause was a trivial oversight buried upstream — the kind a sharp human might catch in 30 seconds of tracing the flow end-to-end. Finding these roots often unlocks a big step up in output quality.
His conclusion: one of the hardest remaining gaps is that agents are very good at doing the work, but unreliable at noticing when the work rests on a stupid mistake.
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