Is It All Just Vapourware? A Developer's Frustrating Encounter with Agentic AI
A developer's first-hand account of trying agentic development tools, specifically ONA, reveals a gap between marketing hype and reality. Despite the promise of automated feature development, the author faced login issues and wasted $20 in compute units on basic tasks. The piece argues that while AI coding assistance is valuable, current tools add friction rather than reducing it, and suggests that the vendors themselves are proof their products don't work as advertised.
If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does, then the people selling it would be the primary beneficiaries.
- 20k
>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does
I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major project that's found generating code to lead to major productivity speedups, and the consensus appears to be that its just lead to a lot of crappy contributions that are harder to spot immediately as being obvious crap
I regularly see people claim that they are now 10x more productive with LLM code generation, and I just wonder where all the code is. Is it somehow true that these gains are only being realised in proprietary projects, and not a single one of them has put even a small fraction of their new found engineering powers into eg Godot? Why do only the poor quality LLM code generation users make PRs to open source projects, and never the engineers that know how to really use it correctly?
If you look in the open source major project space, you can find almost no evidence that AI code generation exists at all. Go browse your favourite critical tool and look for AI generated PRs that have landed in the codebase, its probably a tiny handful of them in comparison to the human written PRs prior to an LLM ban. It turns out that once you have a verifiable, open q […]
- lordnacho
I don't know how you can claim it's all vapour ware.
Two years ago, I couldn't just roughly describe my backlog and then have the code fixed. I had to type it out myself, run it, look at logs, fix toolchain issues, and so on. It was tedious. Or I could get a junior to do it.
Now can get these things done quite fast, without concentrating nearly as hard.
Clearly, it isn't vapour.
It delivers something. That something we have yet to figure out the best way to use, but there's definitely something there that works.
I get the feeling a lot of people are frustrated because the little gains are lost in organisational chaos, rather than the tools not working.
- badlibrarian
It's August 9, 2026 and if you're a software engineer who hasn't had multiple "holy shit, I can't believe it just did that" moments, it's time to consider a new trade.
- solomonb
The churn in this space puts javascript to shame. As an example, its only been a few months and AFAICT no one is even talking about openclaw anymore.
- jeffreyrogers
I was fairly skeptical of agentic coding before I used it for a real product. Although I still have to be heavily involved in planning the code that LLMs write for me, they can write code much faster than I can, and they know more about edge cases than I do, so they can handle edge cases/subtle bugs that I would have missed. I have been paid to write code at every level of the stack from assembly to frontend javascript, but I'm not equally good at all those areas. In some areas I can still outperform LLMs, but for areas I'm weak they do a much better job than I would have.
I still think of what I'm doing as software engineering, and I'm glad that I had many years of professional and hobby development before using agents since I think that's given me the ability to make good architectural decisions (and helps me resteer the LLMs when they want to do something suboptimal), but my involvement in actually writing code is quickly going to zero. That said, they aren't perfect and they still introduce bugs, but I believe the quality of my current product is higher than what I would have created pre-agentic coding.
Things I've found helpful in keeping quality high:
- Visual regression tests (detect UI bugs before you commit them)
- Fuzz testing of interfaces and app behavior
- Automatically add regression tests for any bug that I/the LLM fixes
- Logging/alerting that tracks an errors/invariant violations triggered in the app
- Performance metrics that are surfaced in a dashboard.
Al […]
- firasd
I wonder if there is cargo culting afoot
There are definitely guys in some companies just pointing an agent swarm at 50 Github tickets and saying "go get 'em boys" and hence need a lot of orchestration tools but for the rest of us do we really need the AI to do all the build steps and the testing steps... or do we just need the new feature that runs when the button is clicked and then we can check it out in the browser ourselves. The code gen is what I need the AI for, not the 'smoke tests' and the tsc finagling. I'm willing to spend some mental calories myself in figuring this feature out step by step
Actually this makes me wonder if some people are just not very into building step by step like "okay first let's check the JSON shape the endpoint returns", "okay now let's make a simple form", etc
- protimewaster
> I was optimistic, but once I had it wired up to one of my projects, instead of making magical hands-off progress on my todo list it spent nearly my entire $20 worth of “ona compute units”, whatever those are, thrashing and trying to get a hold of the todos from linear just so it could pick one to start.
This is one of the reasons that I've simply not bothered with a lot of these types of AI products. It feels like gambling. Maybe I'll spend $20 on tokens and end up with something awesome. Or maybe I'll spend $20 on tokens and end up with nothing useful and then I'll be glad it was only $20 I lost.
- simonw
When this article talks about ONA it means https://ona.com/ - a cloud agent service that was acquired by OpenAI a couple of months ago.
(I wouldn't suggest basing my evaluation of the entire field of coding agents around that particular product.)