Having used Claude Code in anger for a while now, I agree that given the state of these agents, we can't stop writing code by hand. They're just not good enough.

But that also doesn't mean they're useless. Giving comparatively tedious background tasks to the agents that I check in on once or twice an hour does feel genuinely useful to me today.

There's a balance to be found that's probably going to shift slowly over time.

To me the biggest benefit has been getting AI to write scripts that automate some things for me that are tedious but not needed to be deployed. Those scripts don’t have to be production-grade and just have to work.

Similar experience. I just tried Claude for the first time last week, and I gave it very small tasks. "Create a data class myClass with these fields<•••> and set it up to generate a database table using micronaut data" was one example. I still have to know exactly what to do, but I find it very nice that I didn't have to remember how to configure micronaut data, (which tbf is really easy) I just had to know that that's what I wanted to use. It's not as revolutionary as the hype, but it does increase productivity quite a bit, and also makes programming more fun I think. I get to focus on what I want to build, instead of trying to remember jdbc minutiae. Then I just sanity check the generated code, and trust that I will spot mistakes in that jdbc connection. It felt like the world's most intuitive abstraction layer between me and the keyboard, a pretty cool feeling.

Just for fun, once I had played a bit with it like that, I just told it to finish the application with some vague Jira-epic level instructions on what I wanted in it and then fed it the errors it got.

It eventually managed to get something working but... Let's just say it's a good thing this was a toy project I did specifically to try out Claude, and not something anyone is going to use, much less maintain!