I'm in a similar position. I can easily imagine the kinds of tasks where "agentic workflow" seems useful. I just don't have any of them personally right at the moment, and think the world of software has more of them than the needs of software actually justify (due to previous bad engineering and planning).

> The other thing I don't like about agents is their ability to run any command. You can set the option to review every command it runs, but you're then just hand-holding the agent.

The thing about this is that you're treating "agent" as if it refers exclusively to the products offered for that purpose by the major LLM companies. Nothing stops you from designing and implementing your own, with a security model that you think is more sensible. The models won't have been trained against your specific tools, but you can still give them descriptions of what those tools do and then prompt them to make appropriate use of them. All that's really happening is that the LLM outputs some JSON, and your client detects that the output was a tool call (instead of a direct response), parses JSON, invokes whatever other code with whatever parameters and perhaps writes back a response.

There have been several previous HN posts on this, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45840088 .