I expect the downvotes to come from this as they always seem to do these days, but I know from my personal experience that there is value in these agents.

Not so much for the work I do for my company, but having these agents has been a fairly huge boon in some specific ways personally:

- search replacement (beats google almost all of the time)

- having code-capable agents means my pet projects are getting along a lot more than they used to. I check in with them in moments of free time and give them large projects to tackle that will take a while (I've found that having them do these in Rust works best, because it has the most guardrails)

- it's been infinitely useful to be able to ask questions when I don't know enough to know what terms to search for. I have a number of meatspace projects that I didn't know enough about to ask the right questions, and having LLMs has unblocked those 100% of the time.

Economic value? I won't make an assessment. Value to me (and I'm sure others)? Definitely would miss them if they disappeared tomorrow. I should note that given the state of things (large AI companies with the same shareholder problems as MAANG) I do worry that those use cases will disappear as advertising and other monetizing influences make their way in.

Slop is indeed a huge problem. Perhaps you're right that it's a net negative overall, but I don't think it's accurate to say there's not any value to be had.

I'm glad you had positive experiences using this specific technology.

Personally, I had the exact opposite experience: Wrong, deceitful responses, hallucinations, arbitrary pointless changes to code... It's like that one junior I requested to be removed from the team after they peed in the codebase one too many times.

On the slop i have 2 sentiments: Lots of slop = higher demand for my skills to clean it up. But also lots of slop = worse software on probably most things, impacting not just me, but also friends, family and the rest of humanity. At least it's not only a downside :/