How much of your work is actually done “agentically”
With all the talk about AI either being doom or hype, it can be difficult to get an objective assessment for how much AI is actually doing for us at the current moment.
I work in low-level (embedded-ish) programming in C: lots of Linux Kernel work, device modeling in QEMU, etc.
In terms of AI tools I only use GitHub Copilot, so I’m basically still coding by hand but with some code completions which are helpful, but still full of mistakes. I’ve heard through the grapevine that some developers have tools like Claude Code or Codex write literally all of their code for them, but I can’t even imagine such a thing myself. Based on what Copilot outputs right now, I get the impression that AI would probably struggle to “agentically” develop something of huge significance fully on its own. I could be wrong though, I’ve heard Claude Code is pretty powerful (but my company hasn’t bought us licenses yet so I haven’t had the chance to try it out). Overall I’d say that I’m still doing like 90% of the heavy lifting, with AI sort of just acting as an accelerator/assistant for me. Really I’d say that the best thing it does for me is save time looking up stuff that I’d otherwise have had to search for on Google or something.
I’m also curious if it depends on the type of programming (maybe somebody working on front end may have a different experience than people like me working on kernel and hardware stuff). Additionally, it also seems intuitive to me that something like Claude Code would be super helpful for starting a small to medium scale application from scratch (hence all of the headlines about vibe-coded projects that people complete in a weekend), but perhaps not as much for working within or maintaining a pre-existing, large codebase.
Perhaps this question gets asked a lot, I‘m not sure. I’m just curious what it’s like for other people out there since quite honestly I have a hard time determining what’s true in the world these days (though, yes, I realize I’m still just asking random people on the internet). Also sorry for my English.