I agree with your observation, but not your conclusion. The 20 times it failed basically don't matter -- they are branches that can just be thrown away, and all that was lost is a few dollars on tokens (ignoring the environmental impact, which is a different conversation).

As long as it can do the thing on a faster overall timeline and with less human attention than a human doing it fully manually, it's going to win. And it will only continue to get better.

And I don't know why people always jump to self-driving cars as the analogy as a negative. We already have self-driving cars. Try a Waymo if you're in a city that has them. Yes, there are still long-tail problems being solved there, and limitations. But they basically work and they're amazing. I feel similarly about agentic development, plus in most cases the failure modes of SWE agents don't involve sudden life and death, so they can be more readily worked around.