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.