I've been using Cursor and Gemini for coding for some time now, and it gives off the impression of writing good code on a microscopic level. It works for the most part, and there's bugs every now and then that can be resolved easily. However, after working on multiple freelance projects and my day job, I realized that what it did was write code, but it stole "ownership" from you.
In most startups, you're the one that's supposed to maintain the codebase and ensure it works, and if something breaks, figure out where it broke.
Writing AI-generated code gives you good enough results fast, and it can be exhilarating to complete features that would take you days in mere hours, but that's simply tech debt. It happens to be the worst kind of debt: one that you pay at 3AM when production goes down, or when someone points out that this block of code doesn't make sense.
I would like to dedicate this Ramble to a certain Eastern European software agency that bit off a bit more than they could chew and threw AI at the problem.
Reading through the codebase, every few minutes, I audibly exclaimed "How could a human have written this?! Surely, they have a brain! If they did, then they should have at least noticed this nonsense and fixed it!"
Then I remembered something that I'd forgotten, and that's where my character flaw shows: I believe people have as much of an emotional and professional investment in things they build.
I imagine myself as Walter White cooking the best product he can.
Sadly, some people don't have that s0rt of enthusiasm. They're the ones who are better known for frequenting freelancing websites and spend their days working in software agencies. Simply put, they're people who don't feel much pressure to have ownership of a product. If it breaks, they'll get a bad review at worst, and at best, they'll be paid more to fix it and make it better; or someone more competent will for a higher price.
This kind of mentality always existed, and most likely always will, but what AI-enabled coding did was it made them faster, and gave those half-baked skills to non-technical people. While it is to be celebrated, it further allows one to be average, but faster. This reminds me of this particular meme by Shen Comix:
They can't exactly be blamed, though. At the end of the day, we're all trying to make a living by writing code. Churning out half-baked projects at light speed is very profitable, but now that non-technical people also have the same skillset, it's becoming less so. The vocal majority that complain about AI coding tools taking their jobs are the very ones that wrote bad code fast and got their paycheck, then disappeared.
Then again, most small businesses don't particularly need good code. They just need to hit the ground running, fast and cheap. That was their niche, and that niche is being swallowed up.
However, for every ten people that would abuse Agentic IDEs, there will be one person that can use it properly and actually handle the responsibility and I feel that those people will thrive, and those people are those who already care about their product. Simply put, they already have a set of skills that can't actually be replaced by AI, and as a result, are empowered by it.
Not saying I'm one of them, but I try to be.