AI Coding Agents

I’ve been a professional software engineer for 21 years. That’s long enough to see several seismic changes in the way software developers work. The first shift—or at least the first one I took note of—was DevOps. I think Platform Engineering is another. AI coding agents are the new one, and being new it’s the one everyone is talking about.

If you are fresh out of college and just getting started in the industry, I worry there is a strong temptation to misuse AI coding agents in a way that will ultimately harm your career. We all want to move fast, and it might seem like the fastest way forward is to use and agent to generate some code and then throw it over the fence for review. That is a bad idea. Instead, you should take the time to understand the code that your AI agent is generating. Even if you make no changes to the code in that process, you have hopefully learned something. It’s that continual learning that is going to move you up the career ladder.

Put differently, if you are an entry-level software developer and you use AI coding agents in a way that allows you to avoid learning on the job, then it is likely you will never progress past entry-level. If you’re not continuing to learn, why should you? That might be hard to hear, but it’s the truth, and better to learn this now than in five years when you realize your career has taken a stumble right out of the blocks. By all means use AI coding tools, but whatever else you use them for, make sure learning is in the mix. It’s the most important thing you can do with them.