That has not been my experience at all.

It takes 30-40 minutes to generate a plan and it generates code that would have taken 20-30 minutes to write.

When it’s generating “weeks” worth of code, it inevitably goes off the rails and the crap you get goes in the garbage.

This isn’t to say agents don’t have their uses, but i have not seen this specific problem actually work. They’re great for refactoring (usually) and crapping out proof of concepts and debugging specific problems. It’s also great for exploring a new code base where you have little prior knowledge.

It makes sense that it sucks at generating large amounts of code that fits cohesively into the project. The context is too small. My code base is millions of lines of code. My brain has a shitload more of that in context than any of the models. So they have to guess and check and end up incorrect and poor and i don’t. I know which abstractions exist that i can use. It doesn’t. Sometimes it guesses right. Often Times it doesn’t. And once it’s wrong, it’s fucked for the entire rest of the session so you just have to start over

Works for me. Not vanilla Claude code though- you need to put some work into generating slash commands and workflows that keep it on task and catch the bad stuff.

Take this for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1m7zlot/how_planm...

This trick is just the basic stuff, but it works really well. You can add on and customize from there. I have a “/task” slash command that will run a full development cycle with agents generating code, many more (12-20) agent critics analyzing the unstaged work, all orchestrated by a planning agent that breaks the complex task into small atomic steps.

The first stage of this project (generating the plan) is interactive. It can then go off and make 10kLOC code spread over a dozen commits and the quality is good enough to ship, most of the time. If it goes off the rails, keep the plan document but nuke the commits and restart. On the Claude MAX plan this costs nothing.

This is how I do all my development now. I spend my time diagnosing agent failures and fixing my workflows, not guiding the agent anymore (other than the initial plan document).

I still review every line of code before pushing changes.