Writing Code in Agentic Coding Era

23 May, 2026

I wrote this piece at work when I was about to start a new project. I slightly revised it to share it here. I wanted to build "AI practice" within the team. How is it going, you may ask? Have I successfully established a good set of rules to work with AIs and my teammates? I will never know because I have never had serious collaboration yet, and I am quitting this job.

Coding with agents has become a norm fast among software engineers, in my opinion, too fast. We all know what happens when things change too fast. You ought to have problems.

I too use coding agents but I detest vibe coding in any case.

There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper…

— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) February 2, 2025

I believe that there are still a few slightly different definitions of vibe coding. But for me, it simply means that you write a piece of code without you ever reading it or thinking.

I tried vibe-coding for some of my ideas in my dusty idea box, just like anyone does these days. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Even when it worked, however, I never liked the outcome every single time. It was bloated, over-complicated, and most of all, I couldn't accept its decisions for this and that. These were the cases for my personal niche projects, where I wanted to build a daemon to manage scratchpad terminals in my Linux desktop environment, where I wanted an HTML+JavaScript app that helps me to write in two languages (English and Korean, not programming langs), or where I wanted an web app to track my meals. Almost every time I tried to fix it, it came out worse.

For production-level software, it should be obvious that I don't want to ship software that has my name on it without me reviewing it. I had to question myself. Do I like writing software? Or want to have software just to make money? It turns out that I like writing software, the process itself. Of course, I wish my works to be successful and useful for others in any ways. But the coding process itself is what I enjoy and care about in the first place.

Ted Chiang wrote an essay and said¹,

art is something that results from making a lot of choices. ... art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception

I've realized that I enjoy making these choices during the process, either they are small or large. Software engineers are craftsmen. We make an effort to locate the best position of a button. It could be as small as how I design and name an optional flag for a CLI (command-line interface) tool or in which module I want to define a data type and how.

I use agentic coding tools everyday at work, more and more often in my free time. I am now subscribing to four different monthly coding plans. I used to have API credits on six different providers². What I don't like is vibe-coding, not the agentic coding tools themselves. It feels amazing when they get you, doing exactly what you had expected, or sometimes doing slightly more than that. But it is undeniable that they took away decisions you were supposed to make. If it looks good enough, you just accept it and move on.

It wasn't until Simon Willison mentioned about the agentic engineering patterns that I've realized that I have been building my own patterns all along. I may find a time to share mine. But until then, I figured that the best way to share my patterns and perspectives is to share what I read.

Reading list for Agentic Coding

(It goes to a Notion page of mine)

So here is the list of articles that I think worth reading. I gathered these articles spanning from June 2025 til to this date, almost for a year. Not every article is against agentic coding nor about agentic coding, but you may find them mostly against agentic coding. And you are not wrong. To be clear again, I am not saying not to use agents to write code. I am saying that if you are engineer like me, we need to be cautious more than anyone.

I would appreciate a collaborator or a teammate who has established their own opinions on agentic coding tools.