The same is true for coding agents. Just like with a human developer, if you give your coding agent crappy instructions, if you don’t give it proper guidance, if you don’t take the time to point it in the right direction, you’ll get bad code. If you don’t keep an eye on things and continually nudge things in the right direction, you’ll end up in the wrong place. No surprise.
And trust isn’t binary. Imagine if you hired a junior developer, gave them a two-sentence instruction, got back something that wasn’t quite right, and then fired them because of it. That would be silly, right? Well, that is what a lot of developers are doing with coding agents. Saying “I tried agentic coding, and it hallucinated something, so it is clearly worthless” isn’t any different.