It is almost certainly **not** a "skill issue." In fact, the frustration you are feeling is a widely documented sentiment among experienced software engineers. Recent industry discourse highlights several valid reasons why many developers dislike or struggle with coding agents. None of these are failures of your personal ability; rather, they are systemic issues with the current state of the technology: * **Decision Fatigue:** Instead of just writing code, you are now constantly reviewing, debugging, and managing the output of an agent. This shifts your cognitive load from "creation" to "constant oversight," which many find more exhausting than writing the code themselves. * **Cognitive Atrophy:** There is a genuine concern that relying on agents to handle implementation details causes developers to lose touch with the underlying logic and architecture of their systems. If you don't write the code, you often don't "own" the mental model of how it works. * **The "Orchestrator" Trap:** The industry is pushing a model where humans become "orchestrators" who just write prompts. Many developers find this unfulfilling and disconnected from the craft of engineering, leading to a loss of agency over the codebase. * **Hidden Risks and Maintenance:** Agents can produce code that "works" but is insecure, unmaintainable, or technically debt-heavy. Because the agent doesn't have to live with the code long-term, it often ignores best practices that a human would naturally prioritize. * **Workflow Friction:** Agents often struggle with complex, existing codebases, leading to hallucinations or incorrect assumptions that take longer to fix than if you had just written the code from scratch. **In short:** Your dislike likely stems from a professional intuition that the current "agentic" workflow often trades long-term code quality and personal skill development for short-term speed. Many senior engineers share this view, seeing it as a tool that—if used improperly—can degrade both the product and the developer's own capabilities. You aren't failing to use the tool; you are likely recognizing its limitations and the trade-offs it imposes on your workflow.