I use agentic LLMs every single day and get tremendous value. Asking the LLM to produce a set of bite-sized tasks with built-in corrective reminders is something that they're really good at. It gives good results.

I'm sorry if you're using it wrong.

Seconding. In the past months, when using Aider, I've been using the approach of discussing a piece of work (new project, larger change), and asking the model to prepare a plan of action. After possibly some little back and forth, I approve the plan and ask LLM to create or update a specification document for the project and a plan document which documents a sequence of changes broken down into bite-sized tasks - the latter is there to keep both me and the LLM on track. With that set, I can just keep repeatedly telling it to "continue implementation of the plan", and it does exactly that.

Eventually it'll do something wrong or I realize I wanted things differently, which necessitates some further conversation, but other than that, it's just "go on" until we run out of plan, then devising a new plan, rinse repeat.

This is pretty much what I do. It works very well.