After a few months of going down this hole with agentic coding (mostly Claude Code) I personally think the problem comes down to a few factors:
1. Initially euphoria both with having the tool and seeing how much can be done quickly, not having a good sense of its limits or reach. Mining too deep, and disturbing the Balrog. Basically: doing too much.
2. Not sufficiently reviewing the work it produces.
3. The tools themselves being badly designed from a UX POV to encourage #1 and #2.
From my perspective, there's a fundamental mis-marketing of the agentic tools, and a failure on the part of the designers of these products -- what they could be producing is a tool to work with developers in a Socratic dialogue, in an interactive manner, having the engineer have more of mandatory review and discussion process that makes sure there's a guided authoring process.
When guided and fenced with a good foundational architecture, Claude can produce good work. But the long term health of the project depends on the engineer doing the prompting to be 100% involved. And this can actually be an insanely exhausting process.
In the last 6 months, I have gone from highly skeptical and cynical about LLMs as coding agents, to euphoric and delighted, back to a more cautious approach. I use Claude Code daily and constantly. But I try to use it in a very supervised fashion.
What I'd like to see is agentic tools that are less agentic and more interactive. Claude will prompt you Yes/No diff by diff but this is the wrong level of granularity. What we need is something more akin to a pair programming process and instead of Yes/No prompts there needs to be a combination of an educational aspect (tool tells you what it's discovered, and you tell it what you've discovered) with review.
The makers of these tools need to have them slow down and stop pretending to automate us out of work, and instead take their place as tools used by skilled engineers. If they don't, we're in for a world of mess