Right. It feels like we're living in a parallel world or something. Can agents code? Sure. Can you let them code on their own for a serious production project? Not a chance.

Plenty of serious production projects are doing exactly that. Are you using GPT-6 Astra, or something older?

Which serious production projects have AI agents coding on their own? And I’m assuming that means they are routinely taking tasks and deploying them to production autonomously

You and the person you are replying to are talking about different things.

Agents cannot be given a high level goal and then left unsupervised, for hours, without making some dumb decisions.

Right. The only way I'd feel comfortable doing that is if I spent an inordinate amount of time writing very detailed specs, so in terms of labor offset I'm not sure the juice would even be worth the squeeze there. In other words, a sufficiently detailed spec is nearly indistinguishable from code.

What people seem to be wanting is for an agent to infer vast complex data from terse simple data, which I think is probably impossible on a philosophical level. There's real information loss in language, and compute can only make guesses at the end of the day. I really don't see how we bridge that gap.

That's exactly what I meant.

Astra does exactly the same sort of things that Sol or any of the previous agents do. They duplicate code, overengineer, miss the point, etc.

I was very optimistic about it when it was announced and saw all the demos, but a week later I find it only marginally better (and in some cases worse) than before.

Yeah, Astra, not like it matters. It will gleefully make db queries that perform full table scans instead of adding an index. I need to intuit that that's what's happening and then explicitly instruct it not to be negligently dumb.

Reductio ad absurdum.

Doesn't this go directly against what the author is asking about? You're much less likely to enter flow state if you have a team of AI agents which are supposed to be autonomous.

Maybe project managers will finally get to experience flow states?

> But I still wanted what the machine had. It triggered something in my brain. And I believed maybe if I used this thing enough, all the tiny little meaningless tasks would eventually add up to something important.

> Sometimes I’d feel a compulsion to fire up Claude Code and have it work on something, even when I had nothing in mind to accomplish.

Certain people at certain AI companies might cry reading this.

Reminds me of this dialogue between a money manager and MIT economist Paul Cootner:

- "If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?"

- "If you’re so rich, why aren’t you smart?"

Don't be ridiculous! We don't do that anymore.

Great article! Sadly, you don't get much engagement these days if you're reasonable about AI. It's either "don't read the code, run 40 subagents and 1000000x your productivity", "programmers are doomed" or "I'm a snowflake, AI is crap and will never replace me".