Agentic coding's hidden productivity boost

Why exactly do coding agents make us feel so much more productive as developers? I think Max Hodak hit the nail on the head at end of a recent Naval pod:

The thing that really changed is—it used to be you could build a lot, a lot would go straightforward, but then you’d hit some random thing and you could spend an indefinite period of time debugging some narrow thing. Now, with agents, you just don’t get stuck anymore. Which is pretty amazing. Relatively quickly they can find the right way to do things. It used to be that—I remember when other friends would try to learn to program, it was like—”Nope, it’s intrinsically frustrating. That’s part of the deal. That’s how you learn.”