Agentic AI means that anything you know to code can be coded very rapidly. If you know just what code needs to be created to solve an issue you want, the AI will give you that code at the cost of a prompt or two. The problem is that most people don’t know what code needs to be created to solve their problem, for any but the most trivial problems.

The first thing everyone realizes once they get over that thrill of coding like the wind is that raw coding velocity is simply not enough. If you don’t know what to build and just why you wish to build it, all that blistering coding velocity buys you is the ability to create bad and useless code very quickly.

You can use agentic coding tools to produce software not merely faster than before, but better. But to do so, you need to know quite a lot about building good software already. If you’ve been building software poorly, agentic coding tools are just going to help you do so faster.”

Most organizations that write software can’t make any of these trades. They lack the architectural maturity. They lack the testing infrastructure. They lack the deployment pipelines. Most critically, they lack the judgment to know just what is worth building.

Drop agentic coding tools into an organization like that, and one of three things is going to happen:

1. They will launch a series of attempts to “integrate AI into our workflows”, which will fail in various ways, from humorous to demoralizing to catastrophic.
2. They will produce a ton of technical debt which will corrupt their codebases and eventually need to be scrapped.
3. They will be out-competed by startups that are built on agentic coding natively and can run rings around them.

From: Dave Griffith in Software Development in the Time of Strange New Angels