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My AI enthusiasm ebbs and flows. Today I’m realizing that some of my perceived productivity increase is an illusion. I merely moved some of the effort from writing code to having to micromanage a coder.

We usually have a long discussion, plan mode, then execute. But the discussion can feel like micromanagement too because Infind I have to spell a lot more out to it to get a good plan than I would get from an experienced colleague.

How do the topics in discussion get raised? Do you decide or does the agent decide? If the agent decides, how did you prompt it to choose?

I decide generally, but I’ve noticed the agent do a welcome thing and spot something we should do next. I’ll say “remind me about this when we’re done with this” and then when the reminder comes to close the session, I’ll say “draft that as a prompt for the next agent.

And an inexperienced colleague is becoming an experienced colleague when they did the same with me. With the agent, I have to keep diagnosing why the lessons we wrote down aren’t helping them do better the next time. It’s like debugging markdown and that’s harder than debugging code!

Yeah this is something I struggle with a lot. Giving feedback to a junior engineer "sticks" while it doesn't with agents, even with memory and updated instructions and stuff it's always a crapshoot whether it'll just do all the same stuff you had to correct last time