> the amount of time they spend to actually make the agent do the work usually outweighs the time they’d have spent just building the feature themselves

Exactly my experience. I feel like LLMs have potential as Expert Systems/Smart websearch, but not as a generative tool, neither for code nor for text.

You spend more time understanding stuff than writing code, and you need to understand what you commit with or without LLM. But writing code is easier that reviewing, and understanding by doing is easier than understanding by reviewing (bc you get one particular thing at the time and don't have to understand the whole picture at once). So I have a feeling that agents do even have negative impact.

The reason companies, or at least sales and marketing, are so incredibly after AI is that it can raise response rates on spam, and on ads, by "Hyper-personalizing" them by actually reading the social media accounts of the people looking at the ads and making ads directly based on that.