The difference with AI is that the agent becomes the first level of triage. It (many times) asks the easy initial questions (did you turn it off and on again?) so I don't have to. Doesn't always work like this, but often enough.

Respectfully, I disagree. When you have 5 users using an app sandboxed within the corporate firewall that just does some CRUD and basic workflows, these problems you're calling out really just don't matter much. Some do some of the time, but not much.

Obviously not all software falls into this category. But so, so much does. Do you know how many thousands of tiny applications are maintained by big all non-big-tech corporations? I've seen many of them up close -- the code is usually complete garbage (seriously, it's bad; and alas, most was written before the age of AI coding agents), and yet, the business continues to operate and use the software.

For the vast majority of software out there, this quality gap simply doesn't matter. Not everything is big tech, needing internet scale. Most software built by developers at non-tech companies are simple line-of-business apps used by a handful to a few dozen or maybe a few hundred people to do a thing a bit better than the Excel spreadsheet that was used before.

And AI has essentially automated the development of this kind of software. Or rather, it has dramatically increased the ability of skilled developers to produce larger amounts of these kinds of systems.

Excel hardest hit.

[0] https://steamdb.info/app/1541710/charts/#1m

I really hope Anthropic doesn't follow, but I assume they will eventually because why wouldn't they? Google and Meta obviously will, with great enthusiasm.

Open models are the only hope, I guess.

I like this feature as an OPTION that is DOCUMENTED. But that's not how it was rolled out. The CC team + processes clearly failed here. And this is far from the first example of this kind of slopiness.

I don't think it was malicious, but I do think it was quite obviously reckless/careless, and I feel like most of the comments here match that sentiment. Everyone and every team makes mistakes, but unfortunately I don't see the CC team really learning from those mistakes even though they keep happening.

CC is not a stable or reliable tool, it is bleeding edge, and that's a tradeoff you make when you pick it over other harnesses.

Sure, AI can auto-complete the line, but it can't write full functions.

Sure, AI can write functions, but it can't complete full features.

Sure, AI can write full features, but it can't build full applications.

Sure, AI can write full applications, but it can't build them in the right way / ask the right questions / write beautiful maintainable code / do what _I_ do..

Time will tell.

I would just say this: there is a difference between advice for using a product, and for _optimizing_ your use of a product. Between a user and a power user.

I think devs probably disproportionately like to see themselves as power users of any given tool, and thus with coding agents, there are 1000 "systems" being thrown out on GitHub on any given day. Generally speaking, it is safe to avoid these, especially if you're new to the tool.

But saying the fact that people are into optimizing their setups indicates some fundamental deficiency of the tool misses the point, I think.

Claude Code and Codex CLI (and OpenCode, and I'm sure many others) are _remarkably_ effective right out of the box. The teams behind these tools must make them _generically_ useful so that they are accessible to as many people, and as many use cases, as possible. That is part of why, when you become familiar with the tool, there is typically going to be a level of customization you can apply to it to optimize it for _your_ use cases, beyond the generic out of the box configuration.

Similarly, I don't think it would be fair to critique VS Code simply because most power users augment it with a suite of extensions. In fact, it's customizability/extensibility is part of what makes it great.