LLMs make dumb shit by default. Even Linus had a race condition caught in review when he used AI to bulldoze his way through a feature.

Agentic loops have major flaws which humans don’t, a tradeoff you seem to keep ignoring while you suggest that developers and agents are comparable in their output quality. The only comparison is, at surface value, they both produce code. Deeper than that, there are plenty of tradeoffs.

Yes tradeoffs in code quality, project quality, maintainability, technical debt, … you need to be a good programmer to get a good project out of an agent — and even that isn’t enough at times.

The difference is that AI is prone to this issue, even a single agentic process. Humans only really run into this issue with large, disorganized teams.

Humans burn out.

https://maevyn.codes/decoherence

edit: hold up. Presenting as though what I said works in reverse,

verifying 10 pounds of incoherent architectural choices and over engineered submodules of human work is certainly harder than reviewing tee bits of coherent agent work.

as though agentic and human contribution is equatable… wouldn’t that be false equivalency? Tisk tisk…

Human work is not swappable with agentic work without tradeoffs, which is kind of why I was making a point at all.