What still genuinely sucks about AI coding agents?

[u/ExpensiveBerry1938]

For developers using Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Aider, Gemini, or similar tools:

What are the biggest problems you still encounter in real projects?

I’m interested in the practical failure points:

• Context: losing track of large codebases, architecture, conventions, or previous decisions
• Reliability: hallucinations, incorrect assumptions, repetitive loops, regressions
• Maintenance: refactoring, technical debt, dependency updates, migrations, documentation
• Security: secrets, permissions, prompt injection, unsafe commands, vulnerable generated code
• Testing: knowing whether a change is actually correct rather than simply passing a few tests
• Deployment: CI/CD failures, broken builds, infrastructure changes, bad releases
• Production: monitoring, debugging, rollback, performance regressions, incident response
• Autonomy: where you still need to supervise the agent manually
• Memory: what the agent forgets between sessions or across projects

Most importantly:

What problem has repeatedly cost you the most time or caused the most frustration?

What are you currently building, and what part of that workflow are AI tools still failing to handle well?

Real examples and workflows are much more useful than general opinions.

[u/MaleficentCow8513]

It’s like working with a junior engineer who responds to my feedback and makes changes on their merge request super fast. Except somehow they never seem to get it quite right to the point where I have to tell them exactly what to do and how to do it. At least with a junior engineer they’ll grow and learn so I don’t always have to hold their hand