Email: The danger of ‘it feels like magic’

Subject:
The danger of ‘it feels like magic’
Received:
8/10/2026, 6:19:41 PM
From:
"Matt Pocock (AI Hero)" <matt@aihero.dev>
To:
porch.hat.81@rss.andrealin.it
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            Code starts cheap. Without a system, it gets expensive fast.
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&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;&lt;br&gt;
Hey Andrea,&lt;br&gt;
&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;Think about the first time your AI coding agent “just worked.”&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;You described what you wanted in just a few sentences, and it appeared on your screen.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;Code that would have taken you hours to write got generated in minutes.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;It’s a weird feeling.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;On one hand, it can feel like you suddenly have infinite possibilities, and the only thing in your way is your mind (and hours in the day).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;This experience can also feel very destabilizing, in a “this changes everything” kind of way.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;Code feels cheap. You might question the value of your skill set. Or question the engineering rules that you’ve believed to be true until this very moment.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;So has the world of software actually changed forever?&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;Some things have changed, of course. But many of the things that have always mattered still matter.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;That “cheap” code your agent wrote doesn’t stay cheap for very long.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;You spend more time fixing bugs. Making changes starts getting harder and taking longer. Your agent goes from making changes in a single turn to requiring endless back and forth, and even then sometimes the code still doesn’t work and you have to start over.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;Sometimes your agent gets things very, very wrong. It either misunderstands your prompt, skips over huge chunks of work that you forgot to specify, or makes incorrect assumptions because of decisions you didn’t think about before pressing send.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;Tokens (and money) burned. Time wasted. Huge chunks of work you have to do again…&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;Code starts cheap, but it becomes very expensive. And the further you go with a project, the more expensive it becomes. As entropy takes hold, it’s harder and harder to get things back on track.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;Like every story about a magic genie granting wishes, the “magic” of coding with AI comes with hidden costs.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;Those costs appear when you use coding agents without a system for keeping them productive and on track. When you delegate your thinking to AI, instead of using it to think and work better.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2 style="font-weight:bold;font-style:normal;font-size:1em;margin:0;font-size:1.5em;margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#000000;line-height:1.5"&gt;Coding with AI is not magic. It’s a system.&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;And that system, like most of the tools we use every day, works a lot better when you understand it.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;While the “type anything into a box” part of AI makes people expect that agents have zero learning curve, the best results come from treating it like a tool that needs to be learned like any other.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;And while we expect our tools to work exactly the same every time we use them, coding with AI agents doesn’t offer the same promise.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;So how do we close the gap between the first impression you remember and the reality of using these tools in professional codebases?&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;How do we keep that sense of hope and excitement, but without the randomness and hidden costs?&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;I believe that the answer is to pull back the curtain, to stop treating coding agents like a magic wand and start treating them analytically.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;I think this is part of why so many people love my &lt;code&gt;/grill-me&lt;/code&gt; skill and the results they get from using it, and why the idea of grilling before building has spread even wider than my own skills repo.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;Grilling helps us through the “invisible” step of closing the communication gap between you and your agents. It helps you avoid the subtle misalignments and misunderstandings that good engineering practices are designed to prevent. Now is not the time to throw away those practices.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;Instead, &lt;code&gt;/grill-me&lt;/code&gt; treats code as being expensive, and as being important enough to get right. It adds just enough analytical thinking before a line of code is written.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;Grilling is just the beginning. There’s so much more you can do to maintain huge, complex, successful projects with coding agents if you (crucially) don’t throw out all of the old rules of software engineering.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;The more you understand about how agents and LLMs actually work, the better your results will be.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;And best of all, we can use the fundamental techniques that we’ve been using for years to understand agents, constrain them, and get the most out of them repeatedly.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;If you’re ready to learn how to adapt these fundamentals to your work with coding agents, stick around for the next few emails. The AI Coding Crash Course is coming next week.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p style="margin:1em 0;font-family:-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Oxygen-Sans,Ubuntu,Cantarell,'Helvetica Neue',sans-serif;color:#2d2d2f;font-size:16px;line-height:1.5"&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href="https://7751c435.click.kit-mail3.com/o8un089e66tqh6q03x3hvhqppe85zir33oox7ozwq2046q3988pdlr3x020wnrx6xkqw763d3pvlgrnzrn4k6rp6ek0nogn95gqz3x5lgw5v25omxrml6em6lxzh99mmp/vqh3hmuoz7gzkwcwul/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYWloZXJvLmRldi9zL2NyYXNoLWNvdXJzZQ==" style="color:#0875c1" url-id="1877020004"&gt;See what you’ll learn in the AI Coding Crash Course →&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
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