> One surprising thing that codex helped with is procrastination.

Heh. It's about the same as an efficient compilation or integration testing process that is long enough to let it do it's thing while you go and browse Hacker News.

IMHO, making feedback loops faster is going to be key to improving success rates with agentic coding tools. They work best if the feedback loop is fast and thorough. So compilers, good tests, etc. are important. But it's also important that that all runs quickly. It's almost an even split between reasoning and tool invocations for me. And it is rather trigger happy with the tool invocations. Wasting a lot of time to find out that a naive approach was indeed naive before fixing it in several iterations. Good instructions help (Agents.md).

Focusing attention on just making builds fast and solid is a good investment in any case. Doubly so if you plan on using agentic coding tools.

On the contrary, I will always use longer feedback cycle agents if the quality is better (including consulting 5.2 Pro as oracle or for spec work).

The key is to adapt to this by learning how to parallelize your work, instead of the old way of doings things where devs are expected to focus on and finish one task at a time (per lean manufacturing principles).

I find now that painfully slow builds are no longer a serious issue for me. Because I'm rotating through 15-20 agents across 4-6 projects so I always have something valuable to progress on. One of these projects and a few of these agents are clear priorities I return to sooner than the others.