All this and my ultimate conclusion has been that it’s nicer to just use it in targeted scenarios.

If I know it’s the shirt of thing it can knock out in one go without too much code to review while probably not failing, sure. If I’m not sure and there’s a misbehavior that I know will be tedious to sort out, but that it might sort out, then I’ll at least give it a couple of attempts.

If it would take more than a couple of tries, I’ll just go ahead and do it myself. It can complete along the way and I might prompt up a few lines here and there, but I’ll just think through an observed bug rather than endure the codegen grasping at straws.

Also, I’ve seen where it avoided the behavior, but upon review the fix illustrated to me what was wrong, but also that it was absolutely the wrong fix that failed to address a broader underlying issue that would crop up later.

So I’m not on board with the “agentic pipeline” approach. For the same reasons I’ve almost never found a human developer I trusted. Of course the developer behaviors that inspired that mistrust also help me understand why so many people are relatively comfortable with the concept.