I used AI coding agents as my first approach for every task during a full work week. My raw line output went up about 40 percent. The amount of code that actually shipped to production without needing significant rework stayed roughly the same. The agents were fast at the repetitive parts. They could not help me with the parts that were actually hard, which are the parts where you need to understand why a system was built a certain way by someone who is no longer on the team, or whether adding a new component is worth the operational cost your team can barely handle right now. The bottleneck was never typing. Why I did this? Every engineering Slack channel and substack newsletter I am reading is all about fighting about AI coding agents since early 2025. One side says software engineering is basically over and that agents will be writing most production code.…