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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.

That said, for small bits of assistance or getting a task started, I found AI was a useful little tool. Developers do a lot of copy-pasting code from online, and a language model is well suited to doing a more flexible version of that, mapping human language inputs to code outputs.

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?!