I've been quite happy with thinking of agentic IDE operation as being akin to a highly energetic intern. It's prone to spiraling off into the weeds, makes silly mistakes, occasionally mangles whole repos (commit early, and often), and needs very crisp instruction and guidance. That said, I get my answers back in minutes/hours rather than days/weeks. For the cost, for things that would otherwise be delivered by an intern or college-hire SDE, it's a pretty solid value vs. paying a salary and keeping a desk available.

What it isn't, at present, is an investment in the future. I'm not making these virtual interns better coders, more thoughtful about architecture, or more autonomous in the future. Those aspects of development of new hires are vastly more valuable than the code output I'm getting in my IDE. So I'm hoping that we land in a place where we're fostering both rather than hoping that someone else is going to do the hard work of closing the agentic coding gap and growing maturity. Pulling an Indiana Jones style swap could be a really destructive move if we try to pull the human pipeline out of the system too early.

Just paying attention to near term savings runs a real risk falling into that trap.