I Tried Agentic Coding and I Hate It

Tried agentic coding while building a Twitch analytics feature for Twitch Sprout and... I hated it. It bloated the code, ignored library features, and turned me into a spec-writing code reviewer instead of a dev. I also shared where AI has helped as well.

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Transcript

Don Hansen: 0:00

I tried agentic coding and I hate it so much I'm going to keep trying it, but let me just share my experience. So I'm building Twitch Sprout behind the scenes, which essentially gathers data from Twitch, provides useful analytics that are very tangible and actionable for streamers to improve their streams. That's what I'm focused on. For streamers to improve their streams. That's what I'm focused on. So I built out a retention feature because I want streamers to know who is staying like, how the retention is and what is potentially affecting positively or negatively that retention. That's kind of my goal with the retention feature and I built that out. So I decided let's just have ai build that out, why not? And I know everything that needs to happen for that feature to work effectively and I'm using a library called twrple so it allows, it just makes it easy to set up, like twitch authentication and twitch api calls, and so I I just kind of gave it as much instructions as I could think of and it came up with a feature that kind of worked, but it created so many other methods that I just didn't need. It just created a bunch of bloat and what had happened was it created a lot of things that Torpal does already Like the token refresh logic. Torpal handles that, but it built custom refresh logic and it built controller methods to be able to handle that and it just I feel like it should have had that context. It should have been aware to not build this extra stuff that this library comes with, and so it really makes me think about where does it get the information it does to be able to create these features? How deep does it get the information it does to be able to create these features? How deep does it look? And it feels like you're just interacting with a toddler. It feels like you're interacting with someone that doesn't have not someone that's so weird to say something that doesn't have common sense. I am so mixed up with how I can even describe AI. Ai has gotten weird, but you really really have to narrow down that scope and you have to spend a lot of time creating a really well-thought-out spec file and then you're kind of just becoming a project manager at that point.

Don Hansen: 2:49

I like coding. I don't know about you, but I really like coding. I like solving problems through code, and there are some people pushing to abstract that out to an LLM, so they don't have to do that. My question to you is do you really like coding? I don't think you do.

Don Hansen: 3:11

If you love agentic coding, I think you're more of kind of like a you're a product owner, you're a product manager, you're. You don't really like the dev side of things. You don't want to spend significant time coding, and that's okay. But I'm kind of thinking back and I'm realizing there aren't a lot of devs that like introducing AI into their entire workflow in a very substantial way, and I'm starting to realize it's just taking the best parts out of coding to turn you into a product manager. And if you want to be a product manager, that's fine. But if you want that you don't really like coding, that's also okay. Maybe you're a developer with a lot of experience and you don't really like coding. I like maybe you're kind of going into more of a leadership role and and that kind of made me think I'm essentially just doing code reviews, so we can.

Don Hansen: 4:25

I think LLMs will continue to improve over time and they will kind of just be context aware and not need you to hold their hand the entire time with a very, very specific and giant spec file when you're just kind of building out small features. I feel like that is going to get better over time, but what I found myself doing is just reviewing the code. I don't like code reviews. I don't know about you, but that wasn't my favorite part of being a developer. Like. The best part is just like just new grounds, right, like Greenfield projects, where you are just creating something from scratch and you are kind of coming up with consistent patterns and organization. You're thinking about that from the beginning. That's fun. That is really, really fun.

Don Hansen: 5:24

But now I am just reviewing an LLM's code, so I'm not even helping them improve. Right, at least, if I was reviewing someone else's PR, I could give feedback that could help them improve, but I don't. That's not going to happen with just my feedback with this LLM. Eventually we're going to lose context. I'm going to have to start a new conversation and the reality is I just need to come up with a more flushed out spec file, but I'm still reviewing code and I got to go in and start from scratch with their feature from the beginning. I can't really gather too much context. I have to actually dig in and make sure that it didn't create any bugs and understand that it's probably going to be lacking a lot of common sense context and really because I didn't give it the proper spec file. But that's all I'm doing is. If I want to have a better experience with code reviews, I have to improve the spec file. But I don't even like code reviews, I don't.

Don Hansen: 6:28

Why not just code it out myself? The reason why I work on projects, the reason why I build stuff on the side, is also because it's cathartic. It's because I can just pull up my editor, put on some synthwave and I'm just chilling out for an hour and a half at night Like I love that. It's such a de-stressor for me Like I actually, for even when I was on a quad extractor a long time ago, before I became a developer, I used coding to de-stress. It was just so much fun and I have never experienced that fun completely stripped out of what I was doing with coding, until I tried agentic coding and had it build out features.

Don Hansen: 7:21

If you're a developer, I don't know how you would enjoy that. Why are you in this profession? But I think most developers have experienced a lot of what I'm experiencing. And let me know, I'm genuinely curious If you are a developer with a ton of experience and you love AI essentially replacing what you do for the most part and you kind of want to become more of a project manager and really flesh out that spec file. What about that makes that fun for you?

Don Hansen: 7:55

Because I feel like this is just for non-developers. This is for, like, marketing, this is for maybe even designers that need to flesh out some hml, css and javascript. I don't think it's for developers and I can see I I don't think you're gonna get a lot of buy-in for developers for a long time. I think it's just because developers who are really good at what they do and have gotten depth of knowledge and they really care about their craft and skill, they enjoy it and AI strips the best parts out of that. So I want to give it more chances. I do and I'm going to give it more chances and maybe it could help me flush out features.

Don Hansen: 8:43

But the reality is it does code it so quickly that I can't just have it in the background for half an hour or an hour while I work on my stuff. It gets done with the feature pretty quickly and there's no way in hell I am letting it build an entire project. I think it can be okay for prototypes and I've used it to flush out even some kind of design stuff and give me ideas and then I'll iterate on that. I find it useful when I want to use it for for small parts of my code flow. I think it strips out the enjoyment of everything else. So a lot of the agentic coding I just I don't know, I'm not enjoying it.

Don Hansen: 9:26

I just wanted to update you guys and I would love to hear if you guys have tried it. What do you think about it? What do you think about agentic coding and can you seriously see in the next year or two implementing that into your workflow in a substantial way, where you are doing over 50% of just kind of creating spec files and code reviews of these LLMs, or do you prefer to just build things on your own? Now the last thing I want to mention is I can also see it being useful which I think you've got to work on a personal project on the side to still enjoy coding. But I can see it being useful if you just hate your deposition, right, like you hate the company you work for, you're building up someone else's dream, you're not able to work on the features that you want to work on and it's just hell at your job.

Don Hansen: 10:20

I think developers that hate themselves and their jobs would really enjoy this. I do, but in that case I really hope that you do find the company that you want to work for and the features that you want to work for, the features that you want to work for, and you should strive for that. But this is just me trying to be charitable. I tried it. I'm going to continue to try it for a couple more months, but that's my update. What do you guys think about agentic coding? Have you tried it? What do you think of it? Let me know in the comments.