AI coding agents are amazing, but lean on them too hard and your engineering skills atrophy. Aviation already lived through this. Here's what we can steal from how they fixed it.
Their findings are uncomfortable: code churn (lines reverted or rewritten within two weeks of being committed) has roughly doubled since the pre-AI baseline.
Whether you are hand crafting code or using AI tools, you goal should be to solve the problem in front of you so well, that you don’t have to touch that part of the code for years. It’s not always possible, but that’s a good goal to strive for.
A better way to leverage agentic coding imo is:
Pretend you’re a senior engineer and you hate this implementation. What would you do better
Find the edge cases in this PR and write test cases to prove them
Quiz me on my understanding of this part of the codebase
Here are very detailed descriptions of real user flows. How can we design tests to cover this behavior
Etc
There are a lot of idiots that just put Claude on autopilot and merge everything without reading the code. Thats like if the airlines got rid of the pilot and only had autopilot in an empty cockpit. Of course things are gonna go wrong
Whether you are hand crafting code or using AI tools, you goal should be to solve the problem in front of you so well, that you don’t have to touch that part of the code for years. It’s not always possible, but that’s a good goal to strive for.
A better way to leverage agentic coding imo is:
There are a lot of idiots that just put Claude on autopilot and merge everything without reading the code. Thats like if the airlines got rid of the pilot and only had autopilot in an empty cockpit. Of course things are gonna go wrong