I went from one camp to the other in the last month. I've been blown away by whats possible and here's what's working for me:

  - Use Cline with Sonnet 4.  Other models can work but this is the best balance of price and effectiveness.
  - Always use "plan" mode first, and only after the plan mode looks good do you switch to "act" mode.
  - Treat the LLM as though you are pair-programming with a junior engineer.  
  - Review every line that gets written as it gets written.  Object or change it if you don't like it for any reason.
  - Do test-driven development, and have the LLM always write tests first.

I have transitioned to using this full-time for coding and am loving the results. The code is better than what I used to write, because sometimes I can miss certain cases or get lazy. The code is better tested. The code gets written at least twice as fast. This is real production code that is being code reviewed by other humans.