The other day, I was repairing a raidz2 cluster. Power instability during a heavy / long term write operation caused problems resembling defective drives and corrupted metadata all over the drives. I came up with a strategy to repair it but I needed some code which was pretty straightforward.

Rust is easier for me than shell scripting so I started writing what I needed and remembered Zed added agent mode. I decided to give it a shot. I had it use Claude 4 with my api tokens.

It wrote the entire program, tested it, debugged it. It made some bad assumptions and I just steered it towards what I needed. By the end of about an hour, I had my complete fix plus an entire ZFS management layer in Rust.

It did cost $11, but that is a drop in the bucket for time saved. I was impressed.

Just sharing this because I got real and measured value recently that is way beyond the widely shared experience.