As someone said "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes".
Sadly all the AI is owned by companies that want to do all your art and writing so that they can keep you as a slave doing their laundry and dishes. Maybe we'll eventually see powerful LLMs running locally so that you don't have to beg some cloud service for permission to use it in the ways you want, but at this point most people will be priced out of the hardware they'd need to run it anyway.
However you feel about LLMs or AI right now, there are a lot of people with way more money and power than you have who are primarily interested in further enriching and empowering themselves and that means bad news for you. They're already looking into how to best leverage the technology against you, and the last thing they care about is what you want.
As a former artist, I can tell you that you will never have good or sufficient ideas for your art or writing if you don’t do your laundry and dishes.
A good proxy for understanding this reality is that wealthy people who pay people to do all of these things for them have almost uniformly terrible ideas. This is even true for artists themselves. Have you ever noticed how that the albums all tend to get worse the more successful the musicians become?
It’s mundanity and tedium that forces your mind to reach out for more creative things and when you subtract that completely from your life, you’re generally left with self-indulgence instead of hunger.
Only if you are already wealthy or fine with finding a new job
If I were still employed, I would also not want my employer to tolerate peers of mine rejecting the use of agents in their work out of personal preference. If colleagues were allowed to produce less work for equal compensation, I would want to be allowed to take compensated time off work by getting my own work done in faster ways - but that never flies with salaried positions, and getting work done faster is greeted with more work to do sooner. So it would be demoralizing to work alongside and be required to collaborate with folks who are allowed to take the slow and scenic route if it pleases them.
In other words, expect your peers to lobby against your right to deny agent use, as much as your employer.
If what you really want is more autonomy and ownership over your work, rejecting tool modernity won't get you that. It requires organizing. We learned this lesson already from how the Luddite movement and Jacobin reaction played out.
You’re assuming implicitly that the tool use in question always results in greater productivity. That’s not true across the board for coding agents. Let me put this another way: 99% of the time, the bottleneck is not writing code.
Why limit this to AI? There have been lots of programming tools which have not been universally adopted, despite offering productivity gains.
For example, it seems reasonably that using a good programming editor like Emacs or VI would offer a 2x (or more) productivity boost over using Notepad or Nano. Why hasn't Nano been banned, forbidden from professional use?
However you feel about LLMs or AI right now, there are a lot of people with way more money and power than you have who are primarily interested in further enriching and empowering themselves and that means bad news for you. They're already looking into how to best leverage the technology against you, and the last thing they care about is what you want.