For example, I was recently trying to get an agent to debug something which was difficult to debug because it ran in an exotic context, where debuggers and logging and printf couldn't easily reach. The agent kept coming up with more and more elaborate and smart-sounding theories and debugging strategies, but nothing worked. I stupidly kept going with this for like 20 minutes, until finally I just went into an IDE, did a simple "comment bisection" where I commented stuff out until I found the line that was breaking, and found and fixed the problem in five minutes. So I solved it by typing code. The code I typed: "//" (in about six places). I could probably have gotten the agent to do the same thing but would have actually literally had to type more to explain to the agent what I wanted. In fact it took me longer to write this comment describing what I did here than it did to just do it.

It looks like they were originally on Chakra (the JS engine used by IE9+ and pre-Chromium Edge) but added support for Hermes in 2021 or so and removed support for Chakra last year, so Hermes is now the only option. Edge moved to Chromium in 2019, so this means they actually kept Chakra around for a few years just? for React Native on Windows.

It's occurred to me that maybe this just shows that I'm better at writing code and/or worse at everything else than I'd realized.