That makes sense.

My basic problem is: "first-run" LLM agent output frequently does one or more of the following: fails to compile/run, fails existing test coverage, or fails manual verification. The first two steps have been pretty well automated by agents: inspect output, try to fix, re-run. IME this works really well for things like Python, less-well for things like certain Rust edge cases around lifetimes and such, or goroutine coordination, which require a different sort of reasoning than "typical" procedural programming.

But let's assume that the agents get even better at figuring out the deal with the more specialized languages/features and are able to iterate w/o interaction to fix things.

If the first-pass output still has issues, I still have concerns. They aren't "I'm not going to use these tools" concerns, because I also sometimes write bugs, and they can write the vast majority of code faster than I can.

But they are "I'm not gonna vibe-code my day job" concerns because the existence of trivially-catchable issues suggests that there's likely harder-to-catch issues that will need manual review to make sure (a) test coverage is sufficient, (b) the mental model being implemented is correct, (c) the outside world is interacted with correctly. And I still find bugs in these areas that I have to fix manually.

This all adds up to "these tools save me 20-30% of my time" (the first-draft coding) vs "these agents save me 90% of my time."

So I'm kinda at a plateau for a few months where it'll be hard to convince me to try new things to try to close that 20-30% -> 90% number.

I experience the same things. What I’ve found is there is no issue I can’t solve so it doesn’t repeat.

The real issue is I don’t know the issues ahead of time. So each experience is an iteration stopping things I didn’t know would happen.

Thankfully, I’m not trying to sell anyone anything. I don’t even want people to use what I use. I only want people to understand the why of what I do, and how it adds me value.

I think it’s important to understand this thing we use as best we can.

The personal value you can get, is entirely up to your tolerance for it.

I just enjoy the process

For new-ish projects it should give you some crazy speed up out of the box.

For large codebases (my own has 500k lines and my company has a few tens of millions) you need something better like RPI.

If nothing else just being able to understand code questions basically instantly should give you a large speed up, even without any fancy stuff.