“Like all the problems I've had with any of the agents or Anything I've written is where I asked it to make really difficult judgment calls.…And every time I've done that, it's failed horribly. It just does not make the right call.”
Maintainable · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · September 2026
Athayde was walking Robby Russell through a rebuild estimate on a neglected .NET codebase and how AI changes the math on that kind of work. He is broadly enthusiastic about coding agents — moments earlier he described handing test-writing to Claude — which is what gives the caveat its weight. The claim is narrow and testable: not that agents write bad code, but that they fail at complex judgment calls, every time he has tried.
Transcript
…this? Have you thought of that? It would be easier to accomplish the outcome that we've all agreed upon if we do this change. Is that something we could, we could consider? These are, these are all kind of constructs of how to approach those conversations in a collaborative versus combative way.
When we were prepping for this conversation, you had mentioned that there was a, I think maybe a .NET project that was moving maybe towards more of a serverless architecture approach. And
…where you're going to have one engineer in a team that's like, I play with Claude at home and I just did this on the weekend. Here, I just rebuilt the app over the weekend, you know, and everyone's going to be like, what? Now, I think the concern is, is that where that's where now you start seeing business people that don't understand that the human in the loop is still really kind of essential. Like all the problems I've had with any of the agents or Anything I've written is where I asked it to make really difficult judgment calls. And not in the sense of like morality table, judgment calls, but like just complex judgment calls. And every time I've done that, it's failed horribly. It just does not make the right call. And so being able to say, okay, well, here's the thing. Here's things I can run through a rubric. Here's the things I really need to spend time thinking about. And then say, this is what we're going to do and…
Yeah, I concur with that. And it's been interesting because I've, I mean, candidly, I've had a couple of conversations with business owners who were contemplating and trying to figure out. They're like, well, it's almost that same exact. Like, we had this person who was able to show they have this…
Well, sometimes it does. Sometimes it's like, hey, you should go to bed. I'm like, the what? It's eight in the app. It's like 8 p.m. I'm not going to bed yet, but I've worked on it. I'm going to have to be in your terminal
or I'll spin up another instance on another computer. We can just plow through. No, no, like, what do you want me to take off my to-do list, Robbie? It's not telling me that. Like, you already gave me 10 things to do and I'm not done with them yet. Like, you have to make some trade-offs. It doesn't…
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