There are two ways to work (c0de) with AI tools right now. I think most people know the other one exists, but they haven’t taken the time to try it. You should know how to do both. And when to do both.

Assisted Mode

Everybody knows this one. You write some code, you get stuck, you ask a question.

How does date parsing work in Python? What’s this function do? Haven’t we built this already? I need some fucking Regex again.

The AI answers. You copy-paste or accept the suggestion. You keep going. You’re driving. The AI is in the passenger seat reading the map.

I mean, this is really useful. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. It’s also just autocomplete with opinions. Fancy autocomplete. Smart autocomplete.

Great. You’re doing the thinking. You’re deciding what gets built and how to structure it and what order to do things in. You’re just asking for help on some of the blanks. That’s assisted mode.

Agentic Mode

This is different.

You describe what you want. You need to know how to describe what you want.

That is extremely important. Let me say that again. You need to know how to describe what you want.

You need to build an agent that understands how to interpret your description as what you want.

Sometimes it’s going to get it correct and sometimes it’s not. It’s going to go in a different direction than you wanted and you’re going to have to correct it. That’s the job now. You’re reviewing the output, the code, and how it’s producing the code. What are the gaps? You have to find the gaps and improve the agent so that it understands you better.

When I Use Which

I wish I had a clean rule for this. I don’t. That’s the vibes part.

Small or specific things can be assisted. Quick answers. Great. Easy. Move on.

Once you start wanting to touch multiple files, agentic. Major features like commands or parser changes or handler rewrites, recipes or tests. I’m not writing all that by hand. I can describe what I want way better than I can autocomplete it.

Bug fixes? Depends. If I already know where the bug is, assisted. If I don’t, agentic. Let the agent grep around and figure it out. It’s better at reading a whole codebase quickly than I am. Not better at understanding it. Better at reading it.

New features? Almost always agentic. I describe the feature, point it at similar code in the repo, and let it go.

Again, review is super important. Sometimes you have to send it back or start over or change major portions of it. And if you build a system that learns, it’ll get better along the way.

The Review Problem

Switching to agentic mode, your entire job is code review. All day, all the time, constant. That’s the human’s job. Code review.

Are you good at code review? You should get better at it. You need to get better at it.

This is not whether or not the tests pass. You need to identify possible issues and then describe tests that can check for those issues.

The nuanced bugs are the worst. And if those make it to production, you’re going to have problems.

Don’t skim the diff.

That should be the new motto. Read the code. Get better at code comprehension. It’s extremely important. You may be writing less code but you need to sure as shit understand what the code is doing and how it can be bad.

The Hybrid Reality

It’s totally fine to switch between modes depending on what you’re doing or your work session. Agentic can be way more impactful, but assisted mode is way better at helping you understand what the code is doing because you can select code blocks and easily ask questions about it.

So it’s not a toggle, it’s a spectrum. Now isn’t that funny? I’m on the spectrum of agentic development.

Where are you on the spectrum of agentic development?

So Which Is Better?

Neither. Both. It depends. Whatever, just build stuff.

Is assisted mode safer? Really? Like, does the human actually write better code this way? I don’t know. Agentic mode can be faster and you need to be super careful that it’s not gaslighting you into thinking it knows what it’s doing.

Build software for you. And when it makes sense, help out with the community stuff. Support open source.

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