To do something right, you have to do it twice. Never in history has someone's first whack been Good Code. That's why compiling the first time is suspicious. Anything complex enough to celebrate is difficult to keep in your head all at once, and finding a simple alternative is only satisfying if it's worked down from something merely okay.

Having a machine that spits out something merely okay sounds conducive to the goals of this back-in-my-day rant.

It was the first time in weeks, maybe months, that I’d felt something that used to be common in my day-to-day: excitement about the lines of code in front of me. I used to write (approximations of) Good Code most days. Somewhere along the way, everything changed. Nowadays I don’t even write the first version of most of the code I commit. I’m definitely far more productive with an agent at my side. They’re not at all horrible at this coding stuff, just not truly great at it. At the end of the day, the code they spit out is… acceptable. It gets the job done, it passes my litmus tests, but it certainly isn’t Good Code.

You use an agent to write code, the code is not very good, and it makes you miserable. You claim to have written good code every day in the past and to have been happier that way. So why do you still use the agent? Just write the code. Why complain in a blog post? Just do it the way you prefer that also gives better results.