IME, it's faster and less frustrating to just write the code myself, if the goal is to get code to my quality standards.
If you're not seeing this, at best you're probably unable to direct them or use them well.
FWIW, if you don't believe the above, I challenge you to put up a quick git repo, where you are unable to get the deserved quality out, and we can quickly show you how the same quality is available via SOTA agents, within a fraction of hand-coded time.
Depending on the task, it can sometimes be just as arduous to produce enough guidance and guardrails to get the LLM to output exactly what you need that you can trust without issue or extensive review than it is to write it yourself and use the LLM just for ad-hoc generation. It's a constant balance and an endless amount of micro-decisions, honestly, but it's pretty essential to stay engaged and not YOLO with agents the way so many are. Most of my interactions with models these days are done in pseudo-code.
I'll still use 'agents' for throwaway tasks--mostly with local models--including tasks where some sort of ad-hoc code generation is in the critical path (e.g. scraping data).
LLMs can't reach the metaphorical. LLMs don't know what true beauty is. I will grant you they have gotten great at the literal and the poetry forms. But it is the beauty that elevates things to my quality bar, and makes a difference between "legacy code" and "innovation" to me.
I use hundreds of millions of tokens a month, and LLMs have completely transformed the way I work. They're also, frankly, pretty mid programmers.
I think that’s mostly true, but also I think there is some skill to using agents well. Specifically, work with agents to get a really good product requirements document, then task it out into very narrow user stories / vertical slices (this takes some iterating—the AI really seems to want to think in horizontal layers today), then maybe walk through the code interfaces to be super sure you are aligned. At each step, I make the agent interrogate me thoroughly with every question it can think of, and even if we stop now we will have a system design and tickets that are much higher quality than me thinking alone. I could hand those off to anyone to implement, but I think having an agent TDD their way through the code is the sweet spot.
Whenever the agent is doing something I don’t like (e.g., some coding style thing), I pause and have another agent help me write a style guide that agents must read. This slows me down at first but I think it will pay off in time.