it just seems like a lot of work when you could just write the code yourself, just a lot less typing to go ahead and make the edits you want instead of trying to guide the autocorrect to eventually predict what you want from guidelines you also have to generate to save time

like I'm sorry but when I see how much work the advocates are putting into their prompts the METR paper comes to mind.. you're doing more work than coding the "old fashioned way"

it depends on the codebase.

if there's adequate test coverage, and the tests emit informative failures, coding agents can be used as constraint-solvers to iterate and make changes, provided you stage your prompts properly, much like staging PRs.

claude code is really good at this.