Comment by coryrc
Are you sure you haven't moved the goalposts? The context here is "agentic coding" i.e. it does it all, while in the past the context was, to me anyway, "you describe the code you want and it writes it and you check it's what you asked for". The latter does work on free models now.
When one is not happy with LLM output, agentic workflow rarely improves quality --- even though it may improve functionality. Now, instead of making sure that LLM is on track at each step, it goes down a rabbit hole, at which point it's impossible to review the work, let alone make it do it your way.