This feels very odd to me, because I'm actually able to refactor and DRY and generally improve my code and tests and documentation much more with agents to help speed up the process than I ever would have before.

I also make sure to describe and break down problems when I ask an agent to implement them in such a way that they produce code that I think is elegant.

It seems to me like people think there's only two settings: either slaving away carefully on the craft of your code at a syntactic level, manually writing it, or shitting out first pass vide-coded slop without taking care to specify the problem or iterate on the code afterwards. But you can apply just as much care to what the agent produces, and in my experience, still see significant speedups, since refactoring and documentation and pulling out common abstractions and so on are something that agents can do extremely reliably and quickly, but otherwise require a lot of manual text editing and compile/test passes to do yourself.

As long as you don't get hung up on making the agent produce exactly character for character, the code you would have produced, but instead just have good standards for functionality and cleanliness and elegance of design.