It was pretty painful and frustrating, but now that it's relatively stable I'm really happy I took that path. I have full control!

I think the way people approach agentic coding depends on their career experience. I had my project acquired previously at the acquiring company hired a large team to work on it. This forced me to go from being a solo dev to a technical manager who's got dozens of people working on code. I treat codex/claude the same way as that; I am leading the ship and it's doing most of the heavy lifting. It's leverage and helps you get more done if you give the right guidance, constraints, and acceptance criteria.