I let an AI agent loose on my frontend for a week. Honest scorecard.

by Carlos Mendes

Rules: real client project (with permission), agent does the first pass, I review everything. Wins: it cleared 14 tickets of the boring kind (prop drilling cleanup, a11y labels, dead CSS) in the time I would normally do 4. Losses: it confidently "fixed" a race condition by adding a setTimeout, and it writes CSS like someone who has never seen a design system. Net: I shipped more, reviewed harder, and enjoyed the week MORE because the tedious 40% was gone. The leash matters though: PR-only access, no direct pushes, and a checklist it must fill in. It's a junior dev with infinite energy and zero shame.

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Comments

Olivia Chen 1 hour ago

"A junior dev with infinite energy and zero shame" is going on my wall. Same experience here: agents are force multipliers exactly proportional to the strength of your review process. Weak review process, faster garbage.

Grace Adeyemi 1 hour ago

The CSS observation is real, and it's a design-system problem more than an AI problem: agents write against whatever patterns exist. Give one a proper token system and component library and the output stops looking like a ransom note. Garbage patterns in, garbage patterns out.

Liam OConnor 14 minutes ago

That setTimeout "fix" is the whole thing in one line. Agents write code that PASSES, not code that's right — and a race condition passes fine right up until it doesn't. My rule after a few of these weeks: the agent can touch anything covered by a test and nothing that isn't. Green suite, ship it; no test, it's a suggestion I review by hand. Turns the thing into a fast junior who's only allowed in rooms with guardrails. The productivity is real though — I'm clearing the boring tickets in a fraction of the time and enjoying the parts that actually need a brain again.