It’s become a core expectation at work now (Meta). If I’m not actively using it, then I’ll be significantly dinged in performance reviews. Honestly, it’s forced me to consider going to work elsewhere.

It does _feel_ like the value and happiness will come some versions down the road when I can actually focus on orchestration, and not just bang my head on the table. That’s the main thing that keeps me from just removing it all in personal projects.

Is this coming from the hypothesis / prior that coding agents are a net negative and those who use them really are akin to gambling addicts that are just fooling themselves?

The OP is right and I feel this a lot: when Claude pulls me into a rabbit hole, convinces me it knows where to go, and then just constantly falls flat on its face and we waste like several hours together, with a lot of all caps prompts from me towards the end. These sessions last in a way that he mentions: "maybe its just a prompt away from working"

But I would never delete CC because there are plenty of other instances where it works excellent and accelerates things quite a lot. And additionally, I know we see a lot of "coding agents are getting worse!" and "METR study proves all you AI sycophants are deluding yourselves!" and I again understand where these come from, agree with some of the points they raise, but honestly: my own personal perception (which I argue is pretty well backed up by benchmarks and by Claude's own product data which we don't see -- I doubt they would roll out a launch without at least one or more A/B tests) is that coding agents are getting much better, and that as a verifiable domain these "we're running out of data!" problems just aren't relevant here. The same way alphago gets superhuman, so will these coding agents, it's just a matter of when, and I use them today because they are already useful to me.