In my experience, it still does take quite a bit of time (minutes) to run a task on these agentic LLMs (especially with the latest reasoning models), and in Cursor / Cline / other code editor versions of AI, it's enough time for you to get distracted, lose context, and start working on another task.
So the benefit is really that during this "down" time, you can do multiple useful things in parallel. Previously, our engineers were waiting on the Cursor agent to finish, but the parallelization means you're explicitly turning your brain off of one task and moving on to a different task.
In my experience in Cursor with Claude 3.5 and Gemini 2.5, if an agent has run for more than a minute it has usually lost the plot. Maybe model use in Codex is a new breed?
with cline you can give it a huge action plan and it will grind away until it's done. with all the context shenanigans that cursor and copilot do, it can't handle multiple tasks as well. then they are farming requests from the user so they make you click to continue all the time.
This is the thing people need to be most aware of with all of these tools. I like how Roo Code shows you the costs.
It's going to take a while before companies catch up here and realize the "hidden costs" of AI. In a few years I think the narrative will shift to how efficient one is at using AI.
I can only imagine someone somewhere wanted to know "how much does it cost for a line of code?" And for decades no one could answer this. Frustrated with this, the neanderthal business man now turns to AI and is in ignorant bliss with the new found fire about to burn down his house.
So the benefit is really that during this "down" time, you can do multiple useful things in parallel. Previously, our engineers were waiting on the Cursor agent to finish, but the parallelization means you're explicitly turning your brain off of one task and moving on to a different task.