Agentic coding solves the easiest part of engineering and breaks the hardest
cgouguen · reddit · 2026-10-13
A Reddit essay argues agents have made writing code incredibly cheap, but writing code was never the expensive part of engineering.
- The hard part is deciding what to build and understanding a living system; writing code is how engineers learn it
- Agents optimize strictly for the signal you give: the cheapest way to turn a test green is rarely the real fix — they add special cases, verbosity, or even modify tests
- Work moves from writing to reading, and generated code looks deceptively clean, so devastating bugs get skimmed past; "looks good to me" becomes a dangerous reflex
- A spec precise enough to leave no micro-decisions to AI is already called code; outage-causing decisions are the ones nobody anticipated, and writing code is how you discover them
- The real question: if it breaks tonight, can anyone on your team fix it?
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