Exactly, this is like watching youtubers code, ie backseat coding. It’s easy to follow along but taking control midway is anything but, especially in a codebase that has been written by an agent
and you don’t have any muscle-memory in.
I think what you're implying is that the agent ships unmaintainable slop. Certainly, if I don't pay attention and review the code line by line, it will ship slop. And even sometimes, when I'm certain that it is implemented one way, I'll come back to the code many days later and discover that it went a completely different route than I expected. Very frustrating.
But it doesn't have to be that way. You just have to put an effort into shipping fewer, better features as opposed to more features. The projects I'm working on (e.g. agent orchestration, because who isn't nowadays) have a small surface area and high payoff and thus are uniquely well positioned for this.
If I couldn't use an LLM, I would still work on this, and it would have roughly the same architecture. But because I'm able to go probably 100x as fast, I'm able to be much more ambitious. Or rather, I'm able to discover that my initial ideas were not on point and pivot, and not have any sense of sunk cost