Bear in mind that there is a lot of money riding on LLMs leading to cost savings, and development (seen as expensive and a common bottleneck) is a huge opportunity. There are paid (micro) influencer campaigns going on and what not.

Also bear in mind that a lot of folks want to be seen as being on the bleeding edge, including famous people. They get money from people booking them for courses and consulting, buying their books, products and stuff. A "personal brand" can have a lot of value. They can't be seen as obsolete. They're likely to talk about what could or will be, more than about what currently is. Money isn't always the motive for sure, people also want to be considered useful, they want to genuinely play around and try and see where things are going.

All that said, I think your approach is fine. If you don't inspect what the agent is doing, you're down to faith. Is it the fastest way to get _something_ working? Probably not. Is it the best way to build an understanding of the capabilities and pit falls? I'd say so.

This stuff is relatively new, I don't think anyone has truly figured out how to best approach LLM assisted development yet. A lot of folks are on it, usually not exactly following the scientific method. We'll get evidence eventually.

> There are paid (micro) influencer campaigns going on and what not.

Extremely important to keep in mind when you read about LLMs, agents and what not both here, on reddit and elsewhere.

Just the other day I got offered 200 USD if I posted about some new version of a "agentic coding platform" on HN, which obviously is too little for me to compromise my ethics and morals, but makes it very clear how much of this must be going on, if me, some random user, gets offered money to just post about their platform. If I was offered that 15-20 years ago when I was broke and cleaning hotels, I'd probably take them up on their offer.

> This stuff is relatively new, I don't think anyone has truly figured out how to best approach LLM assisted development yet.

Exactly. But as you say, there are so many people riding the hype wave that it is difficult to come to a sober discussion. LLMs are a new tool that is a quantum leap but they are not a silver bullet for fully autonomous development.

It can be a joy to work with LLMs if you have to write the umpteenth javascript CRUD boilerplate. And it can be deeply frustrating once projects are more complex.

Unfortunately I think benchmaxxing and lm-arena are currently pushing into the wrong direction. But trillions of VC money are at stake and leaning back, digesting, reflecting and discussing things is not an option right now.