What ClickHouse learned from a year of coding with AI agents

What ClickHouse learned from a year of coding with AI agents

Some people will tell you agents will take all our jobs. Others insist they are useless. Leadership at many companies mandates “AI usage” without explaining what that entails, leaving engineers confused. We use coding agents at ClickHouse. They work. But they don’t work for everything, and the line between “use the agent” and “don’t bother” moved several times during 2025. Here is where we landed, and how we got there. The three levels of AI-ass…