The Four Horsemen of Agentic Coding

Agentic AI coding tools, while useful, create four significant problems: "slop" (aesthetically poor LLM-generated code that makes codebases unpleasant to maintain), alienation (engineers becoming disconnected from code they no longer directly write), deskilling (loss of craft expertise), and team fallout (deteriorating collaboration as AI takes over shared codebases). The author argues these issues appear to be fundamental characteristics of LLM coding rather than temporary growing pains that will resolve with improved models.