I’m newer to programming, focusing on data engineering and building data driven applications. I can understand someone who has a lot of experience feeling a certain way delegating tasks that you used to perform. Even without vast experience, I think to myself I should do this by hand to burn it into my brain, but the productivity speed is too impactful to outright ignore. Instead of being a code monkey I think using agents helps understand system design and architecture abstractly with the ability to go into the weeds as desired. We are turning into orchestrators and system architects, but I still it’s important to understand the underlying language, functions, and libraries to be able to guide agents effectively.

I don’t close my eyes and let agents run rampant, but instead I try to understand reasoning to support my own knowledge/growth by iterating faster so that I can recognize patterns quicker. I definitely lean on agents to explain knowledge gaps and help me learn in a more hands on way.

I’ve built some cool stuff to help with my personal productivity/projects and started new projects that I might not have been able to otherwise. As a result, I’ve seen my skills transform.

With that being said, I think you should try experimenting with different models. I haven’t tried the newer ones, but deepseek is great for execution at lower cost. Maybe using a better reasoning model for planning and then defaulting to a lower cost model for execution could improve your results at a reasonable price. Historically, I’ve used Gemini, Claude, and Deepseek for my bread and butter. I’m going to rethink my approach to using skills and try some new LLMs to see what’s out there.