> Most of the "LLMs are slowing me down/are trash/etc" discussions I've had at work usually come from people who are not great developers to begin with - they end up tangled into a net of barely vetted code that was generated for them.

This might be your anecdotal experience but in mine, reviewing large diffs of (unvetted agent-written) code is usually not much faster than writing it yourself (especially when you have some mileage in the codebase), nor does it offset the mental burden of thinking how things interconnect and what the side effects might be.

What IMO moves the needle towards slower is that you have to steer the robot (often back and forth to keep it from undoing its own previous changes). You can say it's bad prompting but there's no guarantee that a certain prompt will yield the desired results.