really depends on what you work on and risk profile of such projects and your level. I'm sure if i worked at a startup just responsible for shipping features as fast as possible, i'd be going all in. At my work, finding good ideas is hard and LLM's help in that regard but you can't move as fast as if you knew what to do. In a small company, there is just an endless amount to do.

This is why, to me, it's more interesting to ask the question "how are good devs attaining outsized successes with AI" than "why are good developers wary of AI?"

Yes, there are real reasons to be careful, but that's already obvious to everyone in the field. The real gold is in discovering how successful devs are managing these risks while also retaining the benefits.

From the article:

> they are not hesitant to use a coding assistant, they are hesitant to go all in and let the agents do all the execution.

They are embracing the use of coding agents, but they still want to be in control. That also matches what I see from my most talented colleagues. They outsource certain tasks to the AI and verify the output.

My somewhat unpopular opinion is that only very good developers are able to use AI coding tools somewhat safely. They could have written the code themselves, but it's faster to have the agent do and then verify. The rest of us couldn't write the code, at least not when we start on a project. When we finish, we have some of the skills and could rely more on the AI tools if we were to do it again.

This is also my experience in my own bubble. Even my friends who were skeptical for the longest started finding ways to perform cool cross-org work with them and accelerate their coding.

The biggest pocket of skilled holdouts I've noticed are in more artisan spaces where the craft of coding is part of the art. Things like old-school indie game developers where they're still sweating the assembly output and clock cycles.

Yes sir! 100 times this.

I've seen devs who I once considered good veer heavily into architecture astronaut and/or "productivity hacking" territory with heavy agentic use, then invariably start posting like a hyperactive Linkedin marketing feed. I'm not sure what they're doing. I think they're building AI tools for other AI people to do AI things. It's certainly not reflected in consumer products in any way.

To be honest, I'm starting to get the feeling that heavy AI use gives you a form of brain damage. See also: https://www.fastcompany.com/91520702/y-combinator-garry-tan-...

The problems is the best devs aren’t the ones doing all the work. You have shitty devs too who are barely thinking or checking anything mixing slop code in with what whatever the best devs are doing, so it all eventually turns to shit.