Unless the solution is going to be more secure, faster, more stable etc, why does it matter?

Will the end user care? “Does it make the beer taste better”?

in a word, maintainability

> maintainability is inversely proportional to the amount of time it takes a developer to make a change and the risk that change will break something

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/134863

i could be wrong, but i'm pretty sure that end-users get upset when a change takes a long time or it ends up breaking something for them.

just because people are finding that agents or whatever are speeding changes up now doesn't necessarily mean they won't encounter a slow-down later when the codebase becomes an un-maintainable mess. technical debt is always a thing, even with machines doing the work (the agent/machine still has to parse a codebase to make changes).