Are free AI tools enough to prepare for a programming job?
I have enough programming experience to work professionally without AI, but I'm trying to catch up with current development practices after working in the pre-AI era. I understand…
coding agents
How Are You Managing AI Coding Tools, Extensions, and Agents?
AI adoption is expanding beyond developers. People are installing VS Code extensions, coding assistants, desktop clients, command-line agents, local models, and MCP servers, sometimes without IT approval. That…
How do you keep coding agents from accessing unrelated environment variables?
When I run a coding agent locally, it can inherit the environment variables from the shell that launched it. That could expose API keys or credentials belonging to…
How do you keep coding agents from seeing unrelated environment variables?
When I run a coding agent locally, it can inherit the environment variables from my current shell. That might expose API keys, tokens, or credentials belonging to unrelated…
How Are You Safely Controlling What Coding Agents Can Execute?
I've been using Cursor with tools enabled much more lately, and the speed is great. What makes me nervous is that sometimes the only thing stopping a command…
How Are You Safely Controlling What Coding Agents Can Execute?
I've been using Cursor with tool access much more lately, and the speedup is great. What makes me uneasy is that destructive actions can be only one command…
Are Autonomous Coding Agents Actually Useful for Serious Work?
I'm an ML engineer with an academic background and about eight years of industry experience. I use Python professionally and as a hobby, and I've been experimenting with…
What Are Some Real-World Examples of AI Failing at Coding or Agentic Development?
I'm looking for concrete examples where AI coding tools or autonomous development agents failed, especially in situations where people claim they can have multiple agents design, analyze, debug,…
How can we give coding agents a useful definition of “good code”?
I'm trying to find a practical rule for getting coding agents to produce better code. Instructions like "write clean," "elegant," or "maintainable" feel too vague because people interpret…
Struggling with Kiro for Web UI Design
I'm having a tough time getting a decent user interface from Kiro for my web application. I've been working on it from the ground up, but the UI…