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My exposure to agentic coding has been limited but in the time I used it at a freelance client I did not see the kind of leaps in productivity others describe. The code was sometimes useful, sometimes useless, and always required enough supervision to offset the time savings.

BUT, in my own work I've refused to pay for any of these tools. The tech can be genuinely useful, but it seems completely insane to me to outsource coding itself to a cloud service with a subscription. It's bad enough we did this with CI/CD but now we're even renting the ability to write code?!

As a non-coder, whenever I see coders talking about "oh it's really helpful to help me search a library and pull exactly what function I need" I'm baffled by the fact that these code libraries were apparently not well organized/not easily searchable to begin with??? Baffles my librarian mind

They're often quite well organized actually. Before LLMs, editor software had already built robust auto completion functionality using computer-readable documentation. What's harder to find is a code sample showing how to combine various functionality to match your precise use case.

Ah so these folks might just be dumb when it comes to searching, which actually doesn't surprise me (again speaking from my librarian background lol) If there's no example to work off of, then how is AI a help during that part? Does it just combine things more quickly for you to experiment with?