I don't understand the appeal of parallel agent programming.

Even Opus is often outputting wrong shit, or questionable code, I have to manually fix, refactor because it's quicker done that way. What do you get from parallel agents one can't do? Surely you can throw in a couple of extra cycles and "specialized agents" aka just different prompts, but I don't think the extra benefit is worth the token cost.

I just throw a prompt defining what I want done, review and regenerate if I don't like something, wait until it's done generating, maybe stretch or read something, kick into manual gear to iron out details, call it a day.

Sometimes I wonder if LLMs even help at all. They seem to make programming easier, but the cognitive load has reduced only marginally, but you still need to know what you're doing when reviewing it, is reviewing code easier than writing code? Is reviewing code you didn't write easier than manually writing it and bit by bit building context in your head?

Everyone calls those tools miraculous and we get the impression it makes our lives easier. But to my knowledge no data has proven this is the case, apart from wild sensationalistic claims by CEOs and other LLM figureheads.

If there's something I know is that our perspective is very often flawed, and our feelings can deceive us into believing things. We are wired to be lazy, is it far fetched to say LLMs make things easier, not better?