In my post about AI agents as power tools I ended with “don’t confuse the tool for the craftsperson.” This is worth expanding, because the confusion runs in both directions and both cause problems.

The mentorship trap

AI agents communicate in natural language. They say “I” and “I think” and “let me try.” They apologize when they make mistakes. This makes it easy to treat them like junior colleagues who work very fast.

In an earlier post I wrote that code communicates to the computer and to future readers. With AI coding agents, there’s a third audience: the agent itself. The agent reads your code to understand how to extend it. Good architecture makes this communication clearer. Bad architecture makes the agent confidently generate more bad code.

AI agents are very good at using well-designed components. They are not very good at designing them. They can implement against a clear interface, follow established patterns, and generate code that fits into an existing structure. They struggle with deciding what the interfaces should be, knowing which abstractions will age well, and understanding the domain deeply enough to decompose it correctly.