I think what people are missing is that they work sometimes and sometimes they don't work.

People think "Oh, it works better when somebody else does it" or "There must be some model that does better than the one I am using" or "If I knew how to prompt better I'd get better results" or "There must be some other agentic IDE which is better than the one I am using."

All those things might be true but they just change the odds, they don't change the fact that it works sometimes and fails other times.

For instance I asked an agent to write me a screen to display some well-typed data. It came up with something great right away that was missing some fields and had some inconsistent formatting but it fixed all those problems when I mentioned them -- all speaking the language of product managers and end users. The code quality was just great, as good as if I wrote it, maybe better.

Plenty of times it doesn't work out like that.

I was working on some code where I didn't really understand the typescript types and fed it the crazy error messages I was getting and it made a try to understand them and didn't really, I used it as a "rubber duck" over the course of a day or two and working with it I eventually came to understand what was wrong and how to fix and I got into a place that I like and when there is an error I can understand it and it can understand it too.

Sometimes it writes something that doesn't typecheck and I tell it to run tsc and fix the errors and sometimes it does a job I am proud of and other times it adds lame typeguards like

   if (x && typeof x === "object") x.someMethod()

Give it essentially the same problem, say writing tests in Java, and it might take very different approaches. One time it will use the same dependency injection framework used in other tests to inject mocks into private fields, other times it will write some a helper method to inject the mocks into private fields with introspection directly.

You might be able to somewhat tame this randomness with better techniques but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't and if I just told you about the good times or just told you about the bad times it would be a very different story.