Eight Reasons You Are Better Than Coding Agents
InfoWorld, Wednesday, October 28th, 2026
Nick Hodges lists eight things human developers do better than coding agents, from understanding context to accountability and taste.
In this InfoWorld column, following his earlier one on reasons agents beat developers, Nick Hodges concedes that coding agents write code faster and better than humans but argues software development involves much more than code.
He lists eight things only humans can do, including understanding non-code context such as business priorities, being accountable when systems break, saying no to bad ideas, deciding what to build after talking with customers, admitting uncertainty and starting projects.
He adds that humans bring taste, since agents tend toward generic designs, and can judge whether an application is actually right.
He concludes that coding agents have shifted the bottleneck rather than removed the need for developers.