Honest intake and experience on why AI agents suck
I’m a programmer and a victim of AI agent usage.
2 years ago, I was new into full-stack development. Before Codex and Claude agents were popular, I depended on ChatGPT at the time to understand few snippets of code and decide whether to put it within the code or not. I already knew basics of code and understood them well, but I had a project to work on which was big and it was my first time applying my knowledge. I had the ability to decide how the folder architecture looked like, how to edit and make the code and styles more professional, decide on naming conventions and everything manually. It felt so good back then. ChatGPT assistance was not the main thing I depended on. I searched through documentations and also websites that had techniques to write a specific code style, and cool libraries that I can use.
I understood everything well in how the code interacted with each other; not to mention the cool feeling you experience when something works by your own manual work, and the ‘Hurray’ moment.
Then AI agents came, and everyone went insane about it. I was so under the pressure that if I didn’t use it, then I will stay behind. I didn’t really care about them as much and as was like ‘meh’. I continued coding the way I did, understood the problems I experienced while coding and trying to fix them, even if it took days, the only AI tool I used was ChatGPT assistant to explain and walkthrough the process. I didn’t depend on any agent to do the work for me.
This year, 2026, I decided to try Codex after seeing all the success story of people vibe coding for few days and casually releasing their app or website. I heard about one guy who does like 20+ websites/apps in a few months — just needed the idea and that’s it.
I became kind of addicted to it slowly. It made cool stuff, and was so into it. There was a time I ran out of credits and paid to get stuff done. Even so, I paid to get Claude to also work in parallel with Codex.
The worst decision in my life was using them. No matter how good your prompt is, from my hours and hours of experience, there will always be something not ok, whether visually, structurally or functionally.
After doing a side project which is big, the folder architecture is so bad. It is so greedy in trying to understand everything fully. I went to refactor it, and it BROKE EVERYTHING I worked on. The code was so badly written that I almost tried to give up in fixing anything.
Can you imagine how much technical and process debt has gone into this? I have so much to maintain and refactor it is actually insane. It wasn’t like this at all during previous times. It is so not worth it.
I’m so sad and I know it is my fault so I don’t care what the comments will be like in this thread. I will be canceling my subscriptions I don’t care if I stayed behind. You guys might say why didn’t you refactor the code after every prompt and the reason is because of credits and time consumption which I thought back to myself that it wouldn’t require that much time for AI to refactor my code. I thought it wouldn’t be so sad.
I’m also seeing big tech industries getting hacked and viewing critical vulnerabilities in big tech. The same people who supported the use of AI agents making all their frickin work and getting paid a lot for AI to do their work.
I hate the frickin CEOs and executives who probability never tried coding with AI and then pester to people how important it is and how it will replace humans. I assure you, that it will not.
There are students graduating from high school fearing to enter CS major, or even better, current CS majors wants to switch their majors because of the fear that AI will take over.
You can not convince me that you need to use it smartly. Better to use AI assistance over AI agents. Atleast you understand from assistance and you get to decide if it is wrong or not, and you can search more by yourself.
Also AI always pretends to correct everything, even my English has gotten worse because of it. Even if my grammar is the best, it will stick paraphrase it for you.
I’m so done.