LLMs can generate code, but the quality of the code at scale is just not there currently by all important metrics such as security, maintainability, separation of concerns, etc.

Today, it's a kind of chaos magic wherein you summon the beast and try your best to contain him, knowing that someone will probably die in the process. Sometimes literally. It's still a force multiplier in the right hands and domain, and agentic coding is a paradigm that won't retract, at least until something better supplants it.

The problem is that few engineers actually have the discipline available to constrain these models appropriately and instead rely on a hodgepodge network of "skills" aka prompt fragments which are passed around and glued together.

I consider myself as having such discipline, being strongly architecturally-minded, user-first, etc. in both design and implementation. And I still struggle to contain the beast many days. I just got through screaming at Claude for intentionally taking a shortcut that I'd forbidden, leading to a ton of wasted time and tokens.

Sometimes I feel like I saved weeks of R&D with a single ten-minute task handed off to an agent, other times I feel like I'd get better returns playing slots in Vegas at the alarming rate Claude burns through money.