Goodbye, Coding
alexcwatt.comI largely have the same feeling: I used to love it but today it's hard to justify coding by hand still. Even for my personal projects I no longer code by hand.
But it's not all bad because with an agent I'm able to achieve much more. I loved debugging an issue and diving deep but an agent with access to observability data and the code is so so much faster that it makes no sense to _not_ use one. I always wanted to have sophisticated debugging/introspection tooling at work but it nevers get prioritized; now it's doable by an agent almost autonomously. And the same goes for performance and profiling: point an agent at pprof for example and you can test all kinds of stuff without lifting a finger.
However I agree about "the zone", working with agents doesn't feel as good as working by hand.
Thanks for engaging with the post! Totally agree about using agents for observability and performance. It's fun to think of new abstractions to build so that agents can interrogate this and other data more easily and cheaply.
BTW I am thinking more about how to get back in "the zone" and just posted a few ideas here: https://alexcwatt.com/back-in-the-zone/
At the very least, I think there’s going to be a competitive advantage for new engineers that do learn to code by hand even if they never do it at their jobs. There is a cognitive ability and understanding that is developed when building code that becomes very useful when coding with agents.
So, I hope coding goes away, but it is changing form though.