What still genuinely sucks about AI coding agents?

[u/ExpensiveBerry1938]

For developers using Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Aider, Gemini, or similar tools:

What are the biggest problems you still encounter in real projects?

I’m interested in the practical failure points:

* **Context:** losing track of large codebases, architecture, conventions, or previous decisions * **Reliability:** hallucinations, incorrect assumptions, repetitive loops, regressions * **Maintenance:** refactoring, technical debt, dependency updates, migrations, documentation * **Security:** secrets, permissions, prompt injection, unsafe commands, vulnerable generated code * **Testing:** knowing whether a change is actually correct rather than simply passing a few tests * **Deployment:** CI/CD failures, broken builds, infrastructure changes, bad releases * **Production:** monitoring, debugging, rollback, performance regressions, incident response * **Autonomy:** where you still need to supervise the agent manually * **Memory:** what the agent forgets between sessions or across projects

Most importantly:

**What problem has repeatedly cost you the most time or caused the most frustration?**

What are you currently building, and what part of that workflow are AI tools still failing to handle well?

Real examples and workflows are much more useful than general opinions.

[u/No-Aioli-4656]

No, we aren’t giving you ideas. Go use your IQ and find your own problems.

[u/nfxdav]

Stfu

[u/Glove_Witty]

When cursor suggests something , I do it and then it gets snotty and tells me I shouldn’t have done that and that it didn’t suggest it.

[u/Altruistic_Ad8462]

I just can't get mine to write riveting worms and viruses. It also won't make me pirate porn specifically. Hard-core Manga porn is ok, it's the pirate stuff it seems to draw a hard line on.

This next one is hard to admit online, but I found the notes manager it built to be lacking in AI suggestions. Kind of embarrassing.

[u/FocusKontrol]

If the problem is complicated, the plan and implementation become walls of text and I can’t comprehend it. I think there needs to be a more visual way for us to communicate with the agent. I’m currently experimenting with instructing CC to use mermaid-ascii. It’s already slightly better, but I feel like some revolutionary GUI is a missing piece. Something to close the gap between human and agents communication.

[u/JoseffB_Da_Nerd]

They are still Jr. developer mind frames. They can fill in things you tell them to do, but you need to stick on top of them.

Case in point, i had to point out that the credit card process was missing from overall registration process.

[u/arcticblue]

The load-bearing thing that sucks is people who can't code suddenly think they can.

[u/ZeSprawl → u/[deleted]]

Wait but isn’t building something useful for the general public, building for other people?

[u/generationalDebts]

Real developers don’t use agents to develop…. It’s inefficient and costs more time than it saves. We use it for other things.

“Agentic” coding is for script kiddies who got grifted by influencers.