Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me

So far as I can tell, generative AI coding tools make the easy part of the job go faster, without helping with the hard part of the job - in fact, possibly making it harder. Coding just doesn't take that much time, and I don't need help doing it. You could make my coding output 100x faster without materially changing my overall productivity, so I simply don't bother to optimize there.

Are you a plumber perhaps?

I am.

That is the mental model I have for the work (computer programing) i like to do and am good at.

Plumbing

I’m not sure I follow the question. I think of plumbing as being the exact kind of verbose boilerplate that LLM’s are quite good at automating.

In contrast, when I’m trying to do something truly novel, I might spend days with a pen and paper working out exactly what I want to do and maybe under an hour coding up the core logic.

On the latter type of work, I find LLM’s to be high variance with mostly negative ROI. I could probably improve the ROI by developing a better sense of what they are and aren’t good at, but of course that itself is rapidly changing!

I have it write algorithms, explain why my code isnt working, write API calls, or make specific functions.

The entire code? Not there, but with debuggers, I've even started doing that a bit.

No software engineer needs any help if they keep working in the same stack and problem domain that they already know front to back after a few years doing the same thing. They wouldn't need any coding tool even. But that a pretty useless thing to say. To each their own.

Not if I can help it, no; I don't have the patience.

I like it!