I have experienced this several times lately when writing software with claude/codex. Sometimes vetting and steering the agent takes longer than it would have taken me if done manually. Sure you can just decide not to vet the output and go into full vibecode, but agents tend to do a lot of dumb things (such as not deleting unused private methods or having temporary variables that are not needed).

In my experience the most effective work pattern for me is using agents to perform research and feedback on high level design, then I write the code manually, then I ask the agent to review the code for potential bugs/issues and fix those. The agents have a much easier time making small changes once the design is 90% there without going fully off the rails and generating slop.

I am working on writing skills to make the agent better but it is a bit painstaking. For example I had to write this inside of a skill because sometimes the agent would just stub out methods and leave TODOs: “always fully complete the requested task before finishing edits unless input is needed”.