Agentic coding allows more people to participate in software creation; however, it should be evident to anyone serious that someone gain more leverage when they know the real steps of software creation. I benefit from knowing how to create software the artisanal way from the before time. I want to share something that I still leverage to this day: skills using editors to explore and debug code.
Maybe you use one or more jetbrains editors, some flavor of VS code, neovim or emacs; its important that software engineers maintain an editor of choice. This allows us to explore the code, run tests, and importantly step through logic of application business rules.
One benefit is we can better see the impact of our approach on the code base being produced. Reviewing the software in an editor allows us to see if we’re using agentic coding techniques effectively. Our approach may need to change depending on the domain of the software.
At the end of the day we’re responsible for the software that’s being created on our behalf. It is therefore our duty to be passionate about the tooling we use to keep that connection with the bits we ship.