> I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol.
You didn’t find that to be a little too much unfamiliarity? With the couple of projects that I’ve worked on that were developed using an “agent first” approach I found that if I added too many new things at once it would put me in a difficult space where I didn’t feel confident enough to evaluate what the agent was doing, and when it seemed to go off the rails I would have to do a bunch of research to figure out how to steer it.
Now, none of that was bad, because I learned a lot, and I think it is a great way to familiarize oneself with a new stack, but if I want to move really fast, I still pick mostly familiar stuff.
I'm assuming this is the case where they are working in an existing codebase written by other humans. I've been in this situation a lot recently, and Copilot is a pretty big help to figure out particularly fiddly bits of syntax - but it's also really stupid suggests a lot of stuff that doesn't work at all.
SwiftKotlinDartGo blur together by now. That's too many languages but what are you gonna do?
I was ready to find that it was a bit much. The conjunction of ATProto and Dart was almost too much for the coding agent to handle and stay useful. But in the end it was OK.
I went from "wow that flutter code looks weird" to enjoying it pretty quickly.
You didn’t find that to be a little too much unfamiliarity? With the couple of projects that I’ve worked on that were developed using an “agent first” approach I found that if I added too many new things at once it would put me in a difficult space where I didn’t feel confident enough to evaluate what the agent was doing, and when it seemed to go off the rails I would have to do a bunch of research to figure out how to steer it.
Now, none of that was bad, because I learned a lot, and I think it is a great way to familiarize oneself with a new stack, but if I want to move really fast, I still pick mostly familiar stuff.