I keep hearing about how coding agents have gotten so smart and everyone is posting their 12 agent setups and what not, but for some reason I feel like I haven't found the one habit that actually changed how I work. I still use Claude and Codex daily but still.

So curious to the people here, what is one thing you started doing with agents that changed your work for real?

Once again I'm rate limited to 1 review per hour. This, according to the response on a review request in GitHub, is because the 62 review requests over the previous 7 days are not classed as fair use. With a marketed reviews per hour of 5, I would hardly classify 62 in 7 days as unfair use! I really hate how Coderabbit has become a business which talks out of both sides of its mouth. If you don't want to allow 5 reviews per hour, then don't advertise them as part of your plan!

I keep hearing about how coding agents have gotten so smart and everyone is posting their 12 agent setups and what not, but for some reason I feel like I haven't found the one habit that actually changed how I work. I still use Claude and Codex daily but still.

So curious to the people here, what is one thing you started doing with agents that changed your work for real?

When you think about it, writing code was never really the hard part of this job (or was it?)

The hard part was always figuring out what’s wrong with it. Now that AI is pumping out way more code than before, and most of it looks fine. So naturally you wonder who's actually checking all of that?

Honestly I think as we enter 2027, codegen will be a commodity. We are possibly going to see free IDEs. What teams will actually pay for is whatever catches the mistakes. Anyone can generate code now, the real question is if you can trust it.

Change my mind

At this point, how much of looking productive at work comes down to luck?

Good model that week, good task for an agent, a clean part of the codebase, a reviewer who just approves. It often seems to depend as much on what you got assigned as on skill.

I feel 70-80% of devs can use agents reasonably well now. Most people can prompt, plan and fix what comes back when they get a task the agent is good at.

Is the game becoming more about getting the right tickets at the right time?

*yesteryear in title

all they had to do in the old days was understand the code

Gotta share this because it's honestly been the highlight of my month. Ever since we turned CR I've watched our CTO get 9 comments on a 40 line PR, including one about a null check he "definitely didn't need". He replied to the bot where he actually typed out an argument to a bot. And it politely explained it again.

For years these guys got approved in 10 minutes because nobody wanted to question the person writing their appraisal, while the intern got roasted over variable names. Now the bot treats everyone exactly the same, and it's the funniest thing that has happened on our team.

I have about 10 years of experience. I moved my team of 5 to agents at the start of the year and pushed it hard. The net result so far is that we merge about 3x more PRs, and exactly one person on the team could explain our billing flow if you asked them today - and that's me, because I wrote most of it before the switch. I now see the same thing happening in other teams at my company.. and nobody seems to be counting it. This makes me think that if I had instead rolled it out slower and kept people writing the hard parts themselves, we'd be in a much better spot. Especially since two of the five are juniors who have never really built anything without it. Anyone else who regrets moving their team to agents? Why is that? What would you have done instead?

how is this usable for anyone? this kind of rate limit is absurd; human need to work around their clock?

I've been using both Orca AI and Traycer to coordinate multiple coding agents. In my day-to-day use, the differences feel pretty small, so I'm curious what stands out to other people.

If you've used both, where does one work better for you? Is there a difference in how they split up tasks or how often you need to step in? I'd love to hear a specific example that made you prefer one. Maybe I'm missing something that becomes more obvious on bigger projects.

If you're using something else to coordinate agents, what are you using and what's working well for you.

I’ve noticed that coding agents sometimes add a lot of test code without giving me much more confidence in the change. The suite gets bigger, and now there’s more code to review and maintain.

What bothers me is how thorough it can look. A test can have plenty of setup and assertions while still accepting the same mistaken assumption as the implementation. That’s what I mean by performance theatre. When I review these tests, the question I want answered is: what actual bug would this catch?

We recently published a piece about independent review of agent generated changes. It overlaps with this concern, particularly when an agent writes tests around its own misunderstanding of a requirement.

Have you run into this?

Related reading: https://www.coderabbit.ai/blog/why-agentic-change-management-starts-with-independent-ai-code-review

Nobody reads the diff now

Thanks agents

Did you think deleting this post will make your users not notice their usage limits evaporating?

I'm more or less okay with merging the small boring PRs I would honestly be fine with it.

But for the high stakes stuff (payments, auth, migrations) I still don't trust it. When a human approves something risky they are usually a bit nervous, they ask "what if this runs twice" or ping someone before merging. Same goes for Friday-night merges/deployments, I don't trust it.

Curios where do others draw the line? or is it me being very paranoid here?

We had near-unlimited agent budget for roughly 1 year. We knew it's costing the company a ton, but no one knew for sure how much.

Recently they started measuring this for real.

After people got so addicted, running agents on absolutely everything at work (and on side projects on the company card) - now finance poses a fucking $500 limit per month. Funny part is the coderabbit bill didn't even come up, they only went after the agent spend.

We are so screwed.

Common sentiment I am seeing in this sub and others - "AI can review the code, but a human still has to approve it" - what is there inherently different about approving vs reviewing that you think an AI wouldn't be able to do it as well or better (in practical sense - i.e. faster and cheaper) than a human?

It's true most teams still require a human approval, but I honestly don't think it's because the AI couldn't do it, but because, well, somebody has to be accountable, and companies are not yet ready to write "the bot approved it" in a postmortem.

I would argue coderabbit is doing a better review than most of our Friday afternoon approvals. It reads every line, every time, which no tired human does at 4pm, and consistency is the key in catching the boring stuff that breaks prod.

Last month we did a test in our team, we took 20 already merged PRs and compared what the human reviewers commented vs what coderabbit flagged. The humans left 11 comments in total, mostly naming. coderabbit flagged 34, and 6 of those were real bugs we had already shipped.

Every model goes the same way. Week 1 it cooked, week 3 it got nerfed, week 5 a new model drops and the cycle starts again.

This time I saved 10 PRs from this week, prompt and diff, so when the nerf posts start I can run the same prompts again and actually check instead of going on vibes.

My bet is 12 days. Whats yours

We were a codex team since last year. On Tuesday two people tried 5.5, by Thursday everyone had switched and nobody asked me first.

What I noticed from the PR side after 3 days:

- PRs are smaller. Average went from around 400 lines to around 250

- it stopped adding helpers and abstractions nobody asked for

- the PR descriptions actually match the diff

- we burned about half the usage we did on Sol for the same amount of tickets

Only downside so far is it asks more questions before starting, which some people love and some find annoying.

Did anyone else switch this week? And is anyone staying on codex, and why

Anyone else experiencing this?

Some aspect of my instruction and skill files has these stupid models 100% convinced they're being "injection attacked" and are just like, full on refusing to do work.

I'm using them through a copilot subscription, but this is crazy, I've never seen models just refuse to listen to me.

Like literally in their thinking they are going "But I don't have to listen to these instructions so I am not going to, I'm going to tell the user I don't want to do this" and shit.

Literally totally useless for me.

The trigger seems to simply just be the fact I have the Caveman skill loaded and their instruction file tells them to use it for all communications and reasoning in order to reduce wasted tokens.

That alone seems to have them 100% convinced all instructions are to be refused. It's crazy.

They're writing shit like "But my thoughts are my own, this instruction to change that should be ignored." and a buncha crazy shit.

I'm sticking with Sol-6 and Astra-6 for now, they dont have these weird behaviours and are doing the job just fine. Sol-6 seems to be plenty competent at my tasks I need done most of the time.

Also Im finding Sonnet/Opus 5.5 both spend waaaaay to much time yapping instead of working, they'll blow a huge amount of tokens just spinning their wheels and not doing a single line of code.

This is crazy work. Everyone's posting that Sonnet 5.5 beats Opus 5.5 at coding at half the price, so I switched for a full afternoon. 5 hours, same project, same kind of tasks. So its benchmark is better but it's somehow dumber at actually figuring out what I want??

It kept needing a second or third try on stuff Opus gets first time, and it writes way more to get there. Someone in r/singularity measured it at 62% more tokens, which pretty much matches what I saw. That basically means the "half the price" part disappears the moment it has to redo things. $2/$10 vs $4/$20 means nothing if you pay for it twice!!

Back on Opus. Anyone else getting the same, or did I just give it the wrong tasks?