If Coding Agents Feel Like Nothing Is Happening, You're Doing It Wrong

Thariq from Anthropic recently shared an observation on X that struck a nerve across the developer community:

He is spot on about the avoidance - but if you find yourself trapped in that mania, you are using the tool wrong. Blaming coding agents because your work feels weightless is like complaining that your hammer is terrible at screwing in screws.

The malaise isn't a flaw in the agents. It is what happens when you apply infinite building leverage to the wrong bottleneck, in the wrong room. Specifically, that hollow feeling of "nothing is really happening" comes down to two things.

1. The Bottleneck Moved, But Our Habits Didn't

For decades, building the product was the hard part. Turning an idea into working software required weeks of grueling engineering, so our brains rightly wired "shipping code" to "making real progress."

Coding agents flipped that equation overnight. Now that building is the easy part, products and features are cheap to produce. We can prompt our way through five new features before lunch, and because of our old mental wiring, it feels like we are accomplishing something.

And we are. Sort of. The code compiles, the UI renders, and the repo grows.

Except products and features only matter when they reach people - and getting people is now the hard part. The real bottleneck has shifted entirely to distribution: getting users, closing sales, and doing the unglamorous work of marketing.

When you use coding agents to ship 50 features for a product with zero users, you aren't experiencing a mysterious AI fugue state. You are hiding in the safety of your terminal to avoid the uncomfortable work of talking to customers. Once you have built 50 things that nobody is using, of course it feels like nothing is happening. Nothing is happening.

2. The Walled-In Castle of Tech

The second culprit is the environment where most of this frantic building takes place. Right now, the tech and AI world operates like a walled-in castle - a self-contained ecosystem where thousands of builders are cranking out slight permutations and micro-improvements on each other's products.

When you spend all day building developer tools for other developers who are also building developer tools, even breakneck output starts to feel like running on a treadmill. You are optimizing inside an echo chamber.

The feeling that something is actually happening with AI is felt most acutely when you step outside the castle walls and apply these tools to the 99% of businesses that aren't tech: local schools, brick-and-mortar storefronts, trades, and small-to-midsize manufacturing.

Those organizations aren't looking for another marginal wrapper or an incremental tweak to a SaaS dashboard. They are dealing with tangible, everyday operational friction - manual quoting, fragmented scheduling, inventory headaches, and hours of repetitive admin work.

When you stop building in a vacuum, do the hard work of distribution, and point AI at real problems outside the insular world of tech, the mania vanishes. What replaces it is the literal opposite of "nothing is really happening."