I've been a slow AI adopter because my early experiences with it produced low-quality output. I've finally started to experiment with agents. My immediate thought was "wow, now I'm moving so fast!" But - was I doing it the right way? Was the output still low-quality?
So I gave myself a low-stakes personal coding project to work on over the long weekend to dive deeper.
The result: I have code. A lot of code. And some tests. I only wrote about 5% of the code myself, and none of the tests.
There were a lot of bugs. And a lot of time spent wrangling the agent to "make this change, not that" and undo things it kept trying to redo in a "wrong" way.
I got to iterate fast, in places. And I got very bogged down in other places.
Sometimes, it almost felt magical. I got to describe something in plain language, the agent went off and wrote code, and then I saw what I described come to life. I didn't have to think about all of the implementation details.
And then it didn't work the way I wanted it to because I didn't think about all of the implementation details.
I am confident that I got a lot more done than I would have over the same period of writing everything myself. But it's clear to me that I need more practice with agents to get the results I want, if that's even possible.
Guess my personal coding project will continue!