I don’t believe I said I don’t use agents for things like research? There’s a difference between trying to get your bearings in a new codebase with an LLM pointing you in the right direction so that you can understand things, and just letting an LLM like Claude take the wheel to do a change for you.

Yes, new codebase we take the time to learn, as every good developer should. Ramp-up doesn’t have to be that long to get one’s bearings.

Also, changes don’t have to be deadbolted into bad designs. If the code was bad before and you have a change to make, it can sometimes be faster in the long run to redesign it and rebuild it so that it can scale better with future requirements. LLMs make this part fast and easy — but again, requires design, and designs require human brain involvement and understanding of the codebase