Once again I appeal: who is shipping code they don't understand? Those who do so are creating the problem, not the coding agent.
I use agents all day, every single day. But I also push back, understand what was written, and ensure I read and understand everything I ship.
Does it slow me down? Uh, yup. You bet.
Yes, this article literally advocates for slowing the fuck down, but it also makes the coding agents out to be the problem, but they're not.
The problem is not the AI users who frequent this board and are shipping code they don't understand. It is the moronic MBA trained executives who can only think about speed, more speed, more revenue for less cost. Quality is an optional expense. A race where the finish line is the current fiscal quarter, to hell with everything after that. The "we can fix it later" Band-Aid over a tumor.
Sensible engineers who look AI as another (potentially powerful) tool in the toolbox "aren't forward looking enough". I watched this happen in real time at my previous company, where every discussion about quality was interpreted as slowing down progress, and the only thing that was looked on favorably was the idea of replacing developers with machines - because they are "cheaper and faster".
The logical minds here on HN are less prone to believing in magic and AI fairies, but they are often not the ones setting the rules. And the number of companies being run by people with critical thinking skills is getting smaller by the day.
It's a matter of affordances. The path of least resistance with agents is to let it commit whatever it wants. That's a natural outcome of the design and implementation of agents.
Yes, humans are accountable for the ultimate output. But so are the people who design and build these automation tools. As the saying goes, the purpose of a system is what it does.
i wrote the blog post and i also wrote pi.dev. i haven't written much code myself in the past 12 months. i'm not making coding agents out to be the problem. the entire last section keeps is basically "use a clanker for this and that".
i'm making specific usage pattersn out to be the problem, and explain why those patterns can't work due to the way agents work.