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Agentic Coding Is a Trap

The MetaphysicsLast updated Jun 4th, 2026

AI-assisted coding is accelerating skill atrophy for developers who haven't built the foundations yet. Here's how to know which phase you're in — and what to do about it.

aiphases of craftshipthe metaphysicscode-firstvalue-first

At the end of a call this week, a developer said something to me that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

We'd been talking for over an hour. He's two and a half years into his first commercial job, came out of a bootcamp, working in a messy PHP codebase — god classes, raw SQL, no dependency injection, global state pulled from superglobals instead of injected. The kind of codebase that's basically impossible to test. The kind of place where you can spend years getting better at navigating chaos without ever learning how to build something clean.

Before the call, he didn't have a name for what was wrong. He just knew something was.

We spent the hour mapping it out — where he is in the phases, what the gaps actually are, what the straight-line path forward looks like. By the end, he had a clear picture. A specific set of things to build. A real sense of what "caught up" actually means.

And that's when he said it.

"I feel like I'm way too far behind."

I told him to keep his head up. That he's got it. That 16 weeks from now, this is a solvable problem.

But I've been sitting with that line since.

Because I think what he was feeling wasn't hopelessness. It was the particular weight of finally seeing clearly. Before the call, the anxiety was vague — a low hum of something's wrong, I can't keep up. After the call, it had a shape. A name. A path.

That's not a bad place to be. That's actually the beginning.

If you're Code-First right now, you should feel like you're behind. Because in a real sense, you are. But that's not a verdict on your ability. It's a diagnosis. And a wrong diagnosis leads to the wrong prescription.

What's Actually Happening Out There

Cal Newport just covered an essay by a developer named Lars Fay that's been making the rounds.

The essay is called "Agentic Coding is a Trap."

It opens with a description of the new workflow most developers have adopted — describe what you want, pull the lever, let agents iterate until it's done. All the while putting a "growing distance between the orchestrator and the code that is being generated and committed."

Fay's core argument: only a skilled developer thinking critically and operating at the architectural level can spot issues in thousands of lines of generated code before they become a problem.

And the irony he points out — the one that got me — is that AI tooling has been proven to negatively impact the very critical thinking skills you need to use it effectively.

Reddit is full of it.

"Losing my ability to code due to AI."

"Letting AI do 100% of my coding fried my brain."

"Every time I use AI I feel like I'm becoming a worse professional."

Someone in my community said he had to take a short break because he was getting close to what he called "LLM psychosis."

I laughed. And then I didn't.

Newport explains that in CS education there's a known phenomenon called the junior year wall. Students let AI handle their foundational coursework. Junior year hits — the hard stuff — and they have nothing to fall back on. Fay thinks this is now happening across the entire industry.

A 30-year veteran developer Cal interviewed said it plainly: "On a personal level, I absolutely feel the effects of skill atrophy. This used to be my source for deep work. It no longer is."

Four years ago I was shouting this from the window.

Learn the skills. Learn the skills. Learn the skills.

I'm still shouting.

But Here's the Part Fay Doesn't Cover

Fay's essay is important. But it's written for a specific type of developer.

And I think one of the most important things I've learned — one of the things I try hardest not to screw up — is this:

You cannot give advice from a lower paradigm to someone at a higher one. And you cannot give higher-paradigm advice to someone who hasn't built the foundation yet.

Both will miss. Both will confuse. Both will waste time.

So let me be more precise about who this applies to, and who it doesn't.

If You're Code-First

The Phases of Craftship exist because the path is real. The sequence matters.

Code-First means you can build things. You can ship features. You know a language, you've worked on a codebase. But when it comes to explaining why you made an architectural decision — why that boundary exists, why that dependency points that direction, why that abstraction was worth creating...