Tag: ai coding

Additive vs. Mutative vs. Destructive Code Changes (and Why AI Agents Love the Wrong One at 2:13AM)

There’s a particular kind of pain that only software developers know.

Not the “production is down” kind of pain.

Not the “we deployed on Friday” kind of pain.

No, I mean the slow creeping dread of pulling the latest changes, running the tests, and realizing the codebase has been “improved” in a way that feels like someone rearranged your entire kitchen… but left all the knives on the floor.

And lately, this pain has been supercharged by AI tooling. Cursor, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT-driven agents, whatever your poison is this week, all share a similar behavioral pattern:

They can produce a stunning amount of output at an impressive speed… while quietly reshaping your system into something that looks correct but behaves like an alien artifact from a parallel universe.

The reason is simple: AI agents don’t “change code” the way humans do. They don’t naturally respect boundaries unless you explicitly enforce them. They operate like an overly enthusiastic intern with root access and no fear of consequences. To understand why this happens, we need to talk about the different types of code changes, and how AI tooling tends to drift toward the most dangerous ones.

So let’s name the beasts.

The Four (Actually Six) Types of Code Changes

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Staying in Software Dev? Best be able to just do things!

I sat down recently and started reading through some articles. Of all the articles of the 20 or so I was reading, one that stood out from the bunch was something Geoffrey Huntley wrote. In the article “The future belongs to people who can just do things” he brings up some points that I – and I think a LOT of people out there like Geoffrey and I – have been thinking in the preceding months. Let’s delve into a few of those thoughts, paraphrased, and elaborated on.

  • First and foremost, for those coders that have been making a living writing those artisanal, bespoke, hand crafted, single lines of thought out code – your time is nigh.
  • Second, if you’re one of those coders that churns out code, but you don’t care or don’t think about the bigger picture of the product you’re working on, you’re also in for a rude awakening.
  • Third, if you have your environment or your stack that you build with, and don’t explore much beyond that stack (i.e. you’re specialized in .NET or Java or iOS) and rarely touch anything outside of that singular stack, you’re running straight at a brick wall.
  • Fourth, if you’re pedantic about every line of code, every single feature, in a way that doesn’t further progress product but you love to climb up on that hill to die arguing about the state of the code base, you’re going to be left up on the hill to starve to death.

Beyond the developers. If you’re a technical product manager and can’t implement, or coder and can’t product, if you don’t understand the overlap then I’d bet you’ll run into some very serious issues in the coming years. If you’re a manager get ready to mitigate all of the above, and above all get ready to deal with a lot of upheaval. If you still focus on hiring the above focused and inflexible engineers, you’re likely to be falling on that sword for your team. Needless to say, there are very rough waters ahead.

That paints the picture of where the industry is right now and who is at greatest risk. Cast out and unable to realign and move forward with the industry – nay – the world in the coming weeks, months, and years. I’m not even going to mention why, what for, or how we got here. That’s a whole other article. I’m just going to focus on the now and the future.

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