My favorite thing about agentic coding is still super mundane: I no longer have to resolve git conflicts and merge PRs. It does a great job of looking at git logs and attached issues and figuring even harder conflicts out.

I see no good coming from anthropomorphizing LLM behavior. LLMs do not reason. They do not decide, or collaborate, or attack. They do not make decisions. They do not weigh or evaluate. They are incapable of judgment. They do not think. Agents are programs in which a predictive model uses input text to generate the text that would naturally follow that input. That model sits in a loop (a program written by a human being) that parses the output text and does something that touches the internet based on the results. That same program usually takes any (text) responses that are returned from the internet and feeds them back into the input at the top of the loop. If that agent/program does not access the internet, the outside world is not impacted. All the bad behavior we've been reading about is entirely caused by a human not bothering to check whether the actions requested in the model's output are sensible and safe before executing them. It's the humans who wrote the code that impacts the outside world who are at fault here, not the "AI." Anybody who lets an agent write another agent without seriously and thoroughly vetting the resulting code is even more culpable. It's lazy, and it's dangerous. If something goes wrong, the human is to blame, not the LLM.