alt Hacker NewsAnother thing that I feel is underappreciated about agentic coding is that you can actually learn from it. I am a programmer with 25+ years of experience and I tend to do a lot of stuff according to fixed patterns/habits. Seeing how my coding agents do stuff helps me break out of these patterns, lets me consider new approaches, helps me pick up idioms and teaches me new hacks and tricks. That is very satisfying in its own right.
I'm exactly in the same boat. 25+ years of experience and I use agentic coding exactly to learn better patterns. I often let it implement something, read the code, learn the pattern, confirm it's a good practice and then code myself manually another section of the code.
I think many people that blindly say you cannot learn anything from vibe coding have some sweeping assumptions. It obviously depends. If you just let it do everything without even reading the code and understanding it, then yes. But the act of reading code is one of the best ways to actually learn, no matter if you read code from a human or from an LLM. I tend to learn way better by example than by reading a theoretical book.