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Like another reply says: practice.

How many hours have you spent writing code? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Were you able to achieve good results in the first hundred hours?

Now, compare it to how much time you've spent working with agents. Did you dedicate considerable time to figuring out how to use them? Do you stop using the agent and do things manually when it isn't going right, or do you spend time figuring out how to get the agent to do it?

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You can't really compare those 2. Agents a re non-deterministic. I can tell Clod to go update my unit test coverage and it will choke itself, burn 200k tokens and then loudly proclaim "Great! I've updated unit test coverage".

I'll kill that terminal, open it again and run the exact same command. 30k tokens, actually adds new tests.

It's hard to "learn" when the feedback cycle can take 30 minutes and result in the agent sitting in the corner touching itself and crooning about what a good boy it is. It's hard to _want_ to learn when you can't trust the damn thing with the same prompt twice.

That comment made my day. I actually had an intern like that!

And then all the heuristics you've learnt change under you and you're stuck doing 100-1000 more hours of learning with a drop in quality during that time.

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