For sure! I offload most work, except the "idea", rarely any domain-specific logic, and rarely any core design / architecture.
Mostly I treat the coding agent genie as a code calculator, building a plan, writing code, running tests, reviewing other code with scripts...
Fine to allow the genie to pick an idea from a queue of work, "what is most urgent and important" but not fine to go with whatever the genie thinks should be done - that's a fast track to building something you don't need yet.
I also run a pair-programming session once a week with my team where we direct the genie as a "third" person. It's important to me that we still socialize around the work, even if the genie is involved. Sitting around the pile of code on the table and riffing together is fun. Just because every team member has Claude doesn't mean we stop gathering around the table once a week.
Generally though, the enjoyment comes from the same problem-solving enjoyment I had when writing code before coding agents. It's fun to create things, fun to fix things.
The challenge is managing the addiction. I try to be done with any coding focused task by 2 pm, that let's me wind down and avoid any late into the evening wrap up. I'll spend the final hours of the workday reorganizing plans, reviewing PRs and admin tasks like email, IMs, etc..
Remember even though your enterprise is paying for your tokens, they are extracting 2x, 3x, 10x maybe even 20x the value from you with the heightened productivity from coding agents. If you have equity, let it rip ha but if you don't, take some of that productivity back for yourself.
Install a coding agent CLI and ask "How can I use {this tool} for coding? What are skills? Can you make one and show me how to use it? Where can I find skills from communities on GitHub?"
Even better is to also tell the agent why, e.g. "I am used to coding in my IDE with auto-completion and Copilot chat, copying and pasting code snippets and testing via scripts. I see a lot of people talking about skills but don't know why they are useful or how to use them."
I try a lot of coding tools... The first thing I do is ask what the tool can do for me, and how it's going to be better than my process without the tool. If the agent can't articulate an answer, that's usually a sign the tool isn't right for me yet.
Nice, I didn't think of this, yeah, I think it's a good idea but I'm looking something else, kinda a website, or community with folks sharing their experiences.
OpenAI, anthropic, lots of companies building coding agent tools, also share skills publicly.
Skills can feel like a big productivity boost at first, but it's good to remember lots of times they represent the ways that a specific person works. That way of working may not always be right for you, or, it might hide how the work is actually being done. Good to always try out the general purpose tool as-is, looking for skills that help you repeat tasks without rewriting prompts, or help save tokens, or help your agent use tools that it may not know how to use already.
Agree here. My philosophy is the "general-purpose" coding agent will keep getting better and better, making skills less and less useful. And it will probably get better at a pace far greater than the customization folks can build around them via skills.
This of course is from my own experience writing code, where agents are already good at software engineering conventions. This probably doesn't hold as well for other tasks, say writing marketing copy with a unique voice
For now, I keep skills pretty minimal - single sentence prompts I send all the time, like "Remove all the slam poetry from the docs in this repo."
I also tend to share often. All skills go into a repo my team can access. No pressure, use them, riff on them, add your own - sharing and engaging on how we do the work is more important than making everyone do the work the same way to me.
reply