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Across our engineering teams, we see different ways of working with agents. One engineer keeps a 40-line rules file. Another types everything from scratch. One switches models by task; one uses the same tool for everything. Both kinds ship. The difference shows up 3 months later, in code review.

When we went back through our agent sessions on one project and sorted them by what the agent was doing, the surprise wasn’t what went wrong. It was where the time went. 51% of the sessions were reactive bug fixing and repetitive pull request (PR) triage. 15% were the feature itself.That number is the argument for this article. Faster code generation doesn’t make delivery faster or safer on its own.

The demo is always the same. Someone types a sentence, the agent writes 300 lines, the tests go green, and the room nods. What the demo never shows is the Thursday afterward.We saw this firsthand when one of our engineers gave an agent a batch-processing migration and got back code that looked better than most first drafts from a person. Clean, well named, sensible comments. It also never advanced the pagination offset. The job ran the same page over and over, quietly, until someone noticed the queue hadn’t moved in an hour.