I use an autorouter as part of my flow, but the final board generally is hand-routed. What I find the autorouter helps a lot with is verifying that I've got san

I use an autorouter as part of my flow, but the final board generally is hand-routed. What I find the autorouter helps a lot with is verifying that I've got sane parts placement. I'll do manual parts placement using my intuition, and then run the autorouter. If the autorouter ends up with 50 routing failures, then I've got nice feedback that the layout is going to be hard to route (and my intuition was wrong). I then focus on the parts it had the most trouble with and tweak. Then, once the autorouter has successfully routed everything, I tear it up and do hand routing. There's still a few placement tweaks that happen at this stage (considering things like analog vs. digital traces, EMC for clocks/high speed data lines, etc) but I know I'm starting from a reasonable base.