The setup

My wife and I used to have a rule: no crazy golf. It came into effect on holiday in 2017 after we spent an hour playing a round together, and then another hour not talking to each other.

(Quick NB. If you’re a reader that I know personally, you’re probably thinking, “Well, that’s not true, I’ve seen you play crazy golf together”. To clarify, this is a rule akin to lactose intolerance or the pirate code; more like a guideline.)

My wife’s pretty competitive, but also pretty good at crazy golf. I’m less competitive and also much less good. You’d think this would work out well; she wins and is happy, I lose and am less bothered. And while the winning and losing bit is certainly spot on, the problem is how well we take the “crazy” part of crazy golf.

We both take time to review the obstacles, pretend we can do the geometry, and plan our shots. However, when I mistime the putt, and it bounces off a windmill blade, rolling further back than where I started, that’s just par for the course (pun intended). When the same happens to my wife, it’s — and I quote — “absolute bullshit”. This juxtaposition of attitudes (coupled with my propensity to “poke the bear”) creates an environment which is … tense.

You may have noticed that I said we used to have a rule — past tense. Have we settled our differences? Did each learn to accommodate the other’s approach? No … so this year on holiday we went kayaking together — the tandem type where you’re in the same kayak — and fuck me, we are never doing that again. So that’s the new veto, and crazy golf is back in.

The shot

So what’s my point? What am I actually on about? If you’ve read one of my posts before, you’ll know that I don’t give the point away for free … you have to earn it. “Beginning, middle, end” is so c.335 BCE.

If you’ve guessed that this is yet another opinion piece on agentic coding — hole in one (pun intended)! Hopefully, with a different spin (pun intended? Can you put spin on a golf ball?) on it, though.

There have been plenty of thought-provoking articles, posts, and papers on whether agentic coding is more efficient, or more effective, or more effortless. I want to talk about something much more important, and much more subjective: whether it’s more fun.

The [third golf verb]

I’ve been writing code for just over ten years now. It sits nicely in the middle of the “things I enjoy”/“things I’m good at” Venn diagram, alongside “twelve backflips in a row” and “lying to people on the internet”. The combination of problem-solving and tidying things up really scratches an itch that spending 5-10 minutes with me will make it obvious I have. Coding, often for my job, is something I do in the evenings in my own time because I enjoy it, not because I have to.

Well … it was (see, I didn’t use past tense this time, for dramatic effect). Turns out, I enjoy letting an agent write code for me just as much. It’s a different itch, but the scratch is just as sweet. Plus, it has the aforementioned benefits of efficiency, effectiveness, and effortlessness.

This is because, as I realised this morning, agentic coding is like crazy golf. Like, ridiculously close to crazy golf … I actually don’t think this is much of a stretch at all, I’m pretty pleased with myself here.

You know where the hole is, you can see most of the obstacles, and you can normally get a good deal of the way there on your first shot — though there’s always a chance that you hit an unexpected bump or that the tunnel you were sure goes straight to the end is actually a ruse. As you get closer to the hole, you can continue to take your time, think things through, and sink it in a decent number of shots … or you can keep hitting it in generally the right direction, and it might go in, or it might go a bit wide, or it might look like it’s going to go in and then somehow skip over the hole and continue past on the other side.

The key point here (I got distracted for a second there) is that, if you’re not too worried about a low score and the occasional unpredictability doesn’t bother you much, you can just have fun with it; really dial back the effort, and it will still, eventually, go in. Or you hit par and just try again … or move on.

Putting the metaphor to one side so we can reach a conclusion that makes sense: agentic coding allows me to try more ideas without dedicating as much mental load to each one. This means I don’t spend as much time trying to anticipate every possible problem before I’ve started, so that I know I’m on the most efficient path. It means I don’t get frustrated when I do hit a sudden, jarring bump. And it means I’m less likely to burn out and stop if, after some time, I’ve not progressed as much as I wanted to.

The outcome is still the — eventually — same, but because I don’t care as much about the individual steps, and am happy to sort of just aim in the right direction and laugh off the attempts that go wide (we’re talking about both agentic coding and crazy golf now), the whole thing is a lot more fun. Does that make sense? It made sense when I started …