agentic coding, these little monsters...
Agentic coding works. That part is not up for debate. Anyone can now design and ship something that would have easily taken two weeks before and in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing, these systems are genuinely impressive. Even at my workplace, a hardcore vimmer is running agent-based workflows in parallel, moving faster than most teams.
So yes, it is useful. But useful and controllable are two different things.
I am calling them little monsters. Not real monsters because these little ones are manageable. They move fast, they generate confidently, and they will run in whatever direction you point them without asking if that direction makes sense. The cost of that speed is comprehension and maintainability without any ownership. If your codebase is being written by LLMs, perhaps you might need LLMs to maintain it too.
This is not a problem if the code is making you money, building reputation, or producing something that matters. Maintenance cost is just a line item when there is a return. But for the smaller things that and one off experiments that never find distribution, the calculus is different as these projects costs in sunken time and technical debt. At some point the question stops being "should I build this?" and becomes "will this ever justify its own upkeep?" It didn't matter before because you were learning things. However, with modern agents there is implicit pressure to ship the artifacts.
What makes this harder is that most people only just started paying attention. For two years, a lot of developers dismissed these tools or stayed on the sidelines. Now they are jumping in, but jumping in without the systems thinking that makes the difference. They will prompt, get output, ship, and then hit a wall they have no mental model for. They will get run over not because the tools are bad, but because they have no harness.
The people who are getting real leverage are the ones who have built things before and those who know where systems break, who can feel when generated code is structurally wrong even if it looks right. That intuition is the harness. It is what keeps the monster pointed in the right direction.
taste, has never mattered more. Not just aesthetics but structural taste. Knowing what should exist and what should not. Knowing when to stop the agent and take the wheel. Distribution still determines whether any of this produces something sustainable. For most of us, it will not reach 1% of a million users. But the ones who survive this shift are not the ones who prompt the best. They are the ones who know what they are building and can course-correct when the little monster wanders.