I was recently listening to the episode on Brain Rot Emergency: These Internal Documents Prove They’re Controlling You!. The one thing that stuck me, was the point Dr. Aditi made - Socia Media Platforms arguably hacked our physical “conenctions”, while AI Chatbots are hacking our need for “companionship”. We are relying more on AI chatbots as our buddy, tutor, therapist, travel planner, and more.

This stuck me because, when I started to reflect on my personal experience with these agents I can easily relate them. Let’s consider a concrete use-case of using coding agents at work. I am feeling empowered using them and they are becoming my first go-to choice whenever I don’t understand anything or need more information. So what’s wrong with that ?

I remember, when I was starting my career as software engineer, I used to have so many questions. Why do we implement this function in this way ? How do we setup monitoring for system resources ? Google search was available, but, it did not had much context to our project, or our codebase, and was not that useful. So, I used to go to my teammate, seniors with these questions. I remember in most cases, not only would I get my questions answered, but, I would also learn couple of additional new things. Or in some cases, that simple question interaction would serve as opportunity to lead completely unrelated discussion and brainstorming.

With coding agents - it is now becoming an unspoken expectation, that if I have any question, I would first run it with agents, before I can reach out to my teammate. In most cases, I would get an answer and that would prevent me from reaching out to my teammate. But, I would get answer to ONLY that question, and would avoid the opportunity to learn anything new. Developer’s socials primarily happening through scheduled meetings, no more walk to the desk for questions.

Existing coding agents in their current form could prove out to be limiting factor for developers social engineering. We need to build a developer plaform that would encourage developer connections.