That's fine, but then the value of the tool evaporates. I agree you have to hold the LLM's hand so that it doesn't do crazy things, but that takes so much time that you don't actually save time over just writing it yourself. That is why I continue to maintain that LLMs are not a useful tool: either you completely give up on quality to get speed gains, or you maintain quality but get no speed gains.
You definitely save a ton of time over writing it yourself, just not as much time saved as “agentic” coding. I don’t do agentic coding either, I think it’s basically a scam. But using an LLM does mean creating stuff faster, much faster. The LLM can write 500 lines of code in seconds. That takes me hours.
I still design the APIs, the system, the tests. But the specific implementation of functions, I am freed from. There is a large speed gain there.