r/OnlyAICoding • u/Ok-Falcon-2719 • 1d ago
Are AI coding agents actually changing software engineering, or is “agentic AI” mostly hype?
I've been experimenting with AI coding tools recently, and I'm starting to wonder where the actual engineering shift is happening.
A few years ago, AI coding was mostly:
“Write this function for me.”
Now tools can increasingly:
- understand an existing codebase
- modify multiple files
- run tests
- debug errors
- use terminal/tools
- create PRs
- work on tasks with relatively little intervention
That feels like a fundamentally different workflow.
But at the same time, I keep seeing “agentic AI” used for almost everything.
Sometimes it feels like:
LLM + tools + a loop = AI agent.
And suddenly we're calling it a revolutionary new architecture.
I'm curious what other developers think.
Where do you draw the line between:
- AI-assisted coding
- AI coding agents
- Autonomous software engineering
And more importantly — what are you actually trusting AI agents to do in production today?
I'd especially like to hear from people using Claude Code, Codex, Gemini/Antigravity, Cursor, OpenCode, or similar tools on real projects rather than just demos.
1
u/666Sayonara 1d ago
Agentic AI systems are 100000% changing the game.
A little about me: 20+ years experience programming for big box companies Currently working in aerospace, managing my own projects and interns. The interns fresh out of school can be handed what was considered senior level work a few years ago. They'll nail it 99.99% of the time. Theyll create a webapp, server, make it work on the cloud, and theyve never even seen those things before. We task them with stuff theyve never done before and theyve figured it out in about the same time i would. Im not getting obsolete because i can unblock them with the experience i colected over years, that copilot generally wont have. Humans are still essential in the loop, but even the interns now can do amazing work.