This is a question that came to my mind when I was working late this evening. I used to enjoy coding late in the evening, working on a hard problem and having the aha moment of finding the solution. I am really enjoying the process of building solutions with agents, but am I learning a skill?
I often justified my side projects by saying I am learning new skills, expanding my tool set, and making mistakes in a low stakes environment. That was very true back then and helped me a lot in my career. I often knew the latest framework, or brought new solutions like Tailwind to my team.
So what am I learning with agentic coding? Or am I just solving another 1 of 1 problem? I would love to hear your thoughts on this, but here are my initial thoughts:
I think I am learning a valuable skill going forward, how to manage multiple agents, understand the critical problems that are being solved, and vet the solutions for simplicity. This involves reading the plans that the coding agent created and just like before the code to ensure the solution is valid.
I also find myself thinking about the broader picture more for my personal apps. Instead of spending 80% of the time writing the code and polishing the app before finding if it works, I am spending 20% of the time building a version one application while spending the remaining time doing market research and considering the market.
Most importantly, though, I still enjoy the process. I have been accepting that coding doesn’t look like it used to and the new meaning of coding is still very interesting, hitting on my main goals to solve meaningful problems.