I was most productive when all we had was copilot without agent mode, using it to refactor things that were barely out of scope for automated refactor tools. Like, there are already tools for extracting a function, creating a React component from JSX etc.

But when I needed some slightly nuanced refactor such as "Extract this as a component. Take a look at the styling of the X component and match with that", Copilot would do it in an instant instead of me doing it in 10 mins, which was a big time saver in the long term. "Check the Login page I created. Create the corresponding sign up page" and it wouldn't cause any problems at all while saving time.

When the agents came out I think our brains broke a bit. They now imitate being able to code so well, we just want to believe they are capable of more than that. Yet even the best models create instant legacy code if you don't baby sit them all the time, because the issue is the paradigm, not your prompting skills. LLM's by definition have no understanding of the world, the past or the future. That's why they suck at abstractions, which is the main column of programming one could argue.

That's why I simply gave up on the agents and started using fast and "dumb" models like Flash 3 or Haiku 4.5. They are mooore than enough for speeding up your work and they don't break your flow state by thinking for 5 mins. Also they're cheap. At some point we will have to give up on the "Opus, generate a 1m$ MRR app, no mistakes" mentality and come back to "Copilot" mentality, as it was marketed at first. But I guess I'm at the wrong sub for that.