Why Are Coding Agents So Dumb?

The first time I used a coding agent, I was mesmerized. Before the agent, I was copy/pasting between my IDE and an AI chat interface. It was amazing to see an agent edit files directly and fix its own errors in real time. After a few days, the honeymoon wore off as I encountered frequent bugs. The agent would stop responding entirely until I restarted it. Development workflows felt stiflingly primitive, and the agent would often declare tasks finished when work had barely begun. This was in February 2025, so it was still early days for coding agents. I figured that in six months, agents would be as technically impressive as the underlying LLMs. Instead, coding agents just stayed bad. AI-assisted development has clearly advanced, but the models are doing the heavy lifting while the agents remain the bottleneck. The agent is not the model In all the hype around AI, the terms tend to get distorted. People are beginning to overload and mix terms like “model” and “agent.” When I say…