Maybe he’s the right tool for the job

A “do everything” app is overkill. I am not a fan of many features Discord implemented over time. But the initial offering of having text chat, voice chat, video chat in one app makes sense. It’s just super convenient to switch the communication type depending on what you are currently doing, without having to onboard and switch between tools.

It’s also hard to draw a line, if you want to go “do one thing well”. Mumble also includes text chat, and user management, ACLs, etc. … for text chat one could use IRC, for user management there are IdPs, and so on. XMPP also doesn’t just do “one thing”. The “X” (= extensible) is heavily used and there are extensions for all kinds of things. Some of the big messengers out there are (or were) using XMPP under the hood (just without federation).

But then it’s not chat anymore. Or screenshare.

There are many good tools that solve individual issues. But Discord solved many of these issues in one tool, and that also has its charme.

Yes, experience matters a lot. I think the comparison of an coding agent being like a trainee is somewhat appropriate. Leave them to their own devices, and you likely don’t get something you should be shipping to production. But guide them appropriately, and they are helpful. The difference obviously is, that a trainee learns, an agent not so much. At least not on an abstract level. Of course the more code you have, the more patterns they can then copy. But if your baseline rots, so will the code the agent derives from that baseline.

It’s not a tool, it’s a chaos generator.

Just like humans. Bullshit code and bad developers existed before agents helped make them.

Aside from fundamentalists the usage of LLMs and coding agents will increase. It’s a tool in the toolbox now and many devs do or will play around with it. Some will have to learn to not overdo it; but that’s nothing new and a lot of fancy technologies or frameworks along the way caused some disruptions because people jumped on the hype train without applying some caution or critical thinking; but that evens out after a while.

Might be we see a big drop in usage when costs increase, but it’s also very very possible that the many technological advances we currently make (hardware to run models becoming more streamlined and the models themselves being tuned more and more) will mean, that we indeed reach a point where this can be done comparatively cheap and maybe even local (to some degree) without having to take out a loan.

I wouldn’t say “managed by LLM” though, just because you spot (partially) agent written commits. It’s hard to judge from the outside how much knowledge the maintainer puts into it. There a big band between vibe coding and fully manual coding. And if we are honest, even “fully manual” is a flexible term (does code completion count? does looking at stack overflow count? does looking at other implementations count? using a search engine?).

The world is changing, for better or worse. But cut devs some slack and let them get used to the tools. (And to re-iterate that: bad quality and bugs were a thing before agents as well. It just took longer.)