Meanwhile I’m here burning company tokens on top-tier models, and I still have to course-correct or problem-solve with my agents every 10 minutes…
English language needs a word to say “I don’t think you’re lying, but I also don’t believe you.”
It's easy for them to one-shot solutions because the problems are very well defined, and the agents can easily reason about how the software will be used. The closer you get to the "real world," and the more complex the business logic gets, the worse the models get at making the right architectural or design decisions. If you're not watching closely to give input and steer the agent, it gets out of control pretty quick.
I find it ironic that these same individuals often loudly and publicly celebrate each new model release (as if they're early investors instead of early adopters), and tend to be very optimistic about agentic coding -- even though their jobs are the most at risk of being automated due to the simplicity of their work.
The closer you are to actual business outcomes and real-world software projects, the more you tend to understand that agentic coding patterns struggle to navigate the messiness of the real world. If you're working as a software engineer in an actual major industry (healthcare, insurance, defense, infrastructure, etc), you're probably going to be more skeptical when a gung-ho SDET makes bold claims about how LLMs are going to take everyone's job within the next 3-4 years.
> “I don’t think you’re lying, but I also don’t believe you.”
They're not lying. They're just a bit naive.