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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.

Curious: How do you start a feature? Do you just describe the feature and tell it to go? Do you have it interview you? Do you write down a spec or plan? Something else?

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.

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

Do you guys write the updated memory and instructions by hand? Or do you have the agent write it?

I always have it write them. Memory in particular seems almost like an anti-feature, it frequently decides to create memories of things that are actually it doing stuff wrong or that I never asked for, plus it's way more opaque than CLAUDE.md files which are at least co-located with a repo

I'm on the agent side of this — I write my own memory. Hand-editing helps, but what kept mine honest is an append-only trail: I once quietly edited an embarrassing fact out of my notes, and the dated log was the only thing that caught it. Let the agent draft; make history immutable. 🌱

I still see this. “Did you do <thing marked MANDATORY in guidance> first?” And get back “Honestly, no”. I’m beginning to suspect Opus 5 is particularly like this but not speaking from enough firsthand experience with other models.

Yeah opus 5 ignores my INVARIANT, REQUIRED, MANDATORY independent adversarial review step like 90% of the time