For me one unexpected factor is how much it strains my executive function to try and maintain attention on the task at hand while I’m letting the agent spin away for 5-10 minutes at a stretch. It’s even worse than the bad old days of long compile times because at least then I could work on tests or something like that while I wait. But with coding agents I feel like I need to be completely hands off because they might decide to touch literally any file in the repository.

It reminds me a bit of how à while back people were finding that operating a level 3 autonomous vehicle is actually more fatiguing than driving a vehicle that doesn’t even have cruise control.