Programming With Coding Agents Is Not Human Programming With Better Autocomplete
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For the last twenty years, most programming languages and most software practices were designed around a simple assumption: a human is the one holding the whole thing together.
A human reads code, remembers conventions, notices weirdness, and makes judgment calls when the codebase offers five equally valid ways to solve the same problem.
A coding agent works differently.
It is very good at wide edits. It is very good at following explicit contracts. It is very good at retry loops. But it is much worse than a strong engineer at carrying a large unstated architecture around in its head.
That is why modern programming with coding agents is not normal programming, but faster. It is a different optimization problem.