Agentic and AI Assisted Coding

For as long as I remember, coding has always been an activity that brings an idea that only exists in imagination to reality. As such no imagination exists in isolation – they are all dependent on one or more things I have already seen. 

My first GUI app mimicked the gold old MS Paint app, but using Turbo C’s Graphics API. It was a good learning experience.

Since then I have built several more apps and frameworks. Each of those started with an imagination of what the end result would look like, followed by weeks and weeks (sometimes several months) of coding. 

Looking back, I can tell that the code sort of wrote itself. I am sure most developers would have felt this when they wrote code. The peculiarities of the programming language and framework they used, coupled with a sophisticated thought-engine that runs in their gray matter, constructed the code that got written in the service of building whatever app was imagined. One could say that the “coding agents” in one’s own grey matter would orchestrate the typing of the code that it generated. 

These days, many of us have transitioned to communicating the imagination quite effectively to AI-coding-agents, which will then generate the code required for bringing that imagination to reality. 

Whether we used coding agents in our own grey matter or from AI-matter, we have gotten habituated to claiming ownership of whatever code got written. 

Personally, the one big difference is that building with grey matter still gives me more kicks and a higher sense of satisfaction & accomplishment than building something with AI-matter. To me, coding is not all about efficiency, or productivity, or a way of getting somewhere fast. It’s one of the ways I genuinely have fun. I am happy to trade that for a few kinds of coding, but not yet ready to let it all go just yet.

Maybe it’s all just attachment to known habits. Or maybe it’s a way of holding on to the experience of joy that comes along with long-form delayed-gratification kind of coding, which honestly isn’t the same as the momentary high that comes along with using AI matter. I think I still dig that joy, which probably also makes me a dinosaur who is going to get extinct soon. Or maybe in due course, I might move on to finding joy by writing code using AI-agents because I want to build more and fast. Or maybe I will not have a choice, and find myself obligated to jump ship out of fear or compulsion or dictum. Who knows?