I have to say I’m in the exact camp the author is complaining about

I find that the code quality LLMs output is pretty bad. I end up going through so many iterations that it ends up being faster to do it myself. What I find agents actually useful for is doing large scale mechanical refractors. Instead of trying to figure out the perfect vim macro or AST rewrite script, I'll throw an agent at it.

I use Claude code for hours a day, it’s a liar, trust what it does at your own risk. I personally think you’re sugar coating the experience.

Please re-read the article. Especially the first list of things we don't know about you, your projects etc. Your specific experience cannot be generalized. And speaking as the author, and who is (as written in the article) literally using these tools everyday. > But I’m just so floored how anyone could not be extracting the same utility from it. It feels like there’s two articles like this every week now. This is where we learn that you haven't actually read the article. Because it is very clearly stating, with links, that I am extracting value from these tools. And the article is also very clearly not about extracting or not extracting value.

Same experience here, probably in a slightly different way of work (PhD student). Was extremely skeptical of LLMs, Claude Code has completely transformed the way I work. It doesn't take away the requirements of _curation_ - that remains firmly in my camp (partially what a PhD is supposed to teach you! to be precise and reflective about why you are doing X, what do you hope to show with Y, etc -- breakdown every single step, explain those steps to someone else -- this is a tremendous soft skill, and it's even more important now because these agents do not have persistent world models / immediately forget the goal of a sequence of interactions, even with clever compaction). If I'm on my game with precise communication, I can use CC to organize computation in a way which has never been possible before. It's not easier than programming (if you care about quality!), but it is different, and i…

> I audit everything myself before making PRs and test rigorously How do you audit code from an untrusted source that quickly, LLMs do not have the whole project in their heads and are proned to hallucinate. On average how long are your prompts and does the LLM also write the unit tests?

But you just confirmed everything the blogpost claimed. You didn't share any evidence with us even though you claim unbelievable things. You even went as far as registering a throwavay account to hide your identity and to make verifying any of your claims impossible. Your comment feels more like a joke to me

> I started a job at a demanding startup and it’s been several months and I have still not written a single line of code by hand Damn, this sounds pretty boring.

> there’s a process of research and planning and perusing in careful steps, and I set the agent up for success Are there any good articles you can share or maybe your process? I’m really trying to get good at this but I don’t find myself great at using agents and I honestly don’t know where to start. I’ve tried the memory bank in cline, tried using more thinking directives, but I find I can’t get it to do complex things and it ends up being a time sink for me.