Yes, I think you are spot on. I've been toying with Claude Code recently to counter my own bias against agentic coding. It will confidently create a broken project, run it, read the error messages, fix it, run it, read the error messages and keep going until it runs. I used it to create a firefox addon, which meant that it invoked me very frequently to validate its output. This was much more tedious than letting it work on problems that it could validate with the console. It also kinda sucks at googling and looking up documentation.

AI "reasoning" in it's current state is a hack meant to overcome the problem of contextual learning[0]. It somewhat works given enough time and good automatic tooling. When this problem is solved, I think we will see a significant boost in productivity from these tools. In it's current state, I'm not convinced that they are worth my time (and money).

[0] - https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en