Beyond Agentic Coding

Summary

Gabriel Gonzalez published a critical essay on February 7, 2026 arguing that agentic coding tools in their current form do not improve developer productivity and actively harm developers' familiarity with their codebases. Gonzalez draws on three types of evidence: his own repeated experiences finding agentic coding unimpressive, observations that interview candidates using agentic coding tools consistently performed worse than those who did not, and academic studies including the Becker study an