If you've dug in sufficiently on plan mode, then what the agent is executing is not a surprise and shouldn't need input. If it does, the plan was insufficient and/or the context around the request (agents.md, lessons.md, or whatever tools and documents you use ) weren't sufficient.

EDIT: Maybe it doesn't work in cursor, but I continue to use vscode to review diffs and dig in on changes.

It turns out that there is a tradeoff in code between velocity and quality that smart businesses consider relative to hardware cost/quality. The businesses that are outcompeting others are rarely those who have the highest quality code, but rather those that are shipping quickly at a quality level that is satisfactory for current hardware.

Engineers using LOC as a measure of quality is the inverse of managers using LOC as a measure of productivity.

This is patently untrue.

It's like how if a junior engineer and a principal engineer use claude opus 4.6 they get radically different results. The junior doesn't have the taste or knowledge to know good from bad so the AI oversteers and slop is made. The principal has finely tuned sense of taste and deep knowledge, so they aggressively steer the AI at every step. This is also true in other AI domains.

To be absolutely clear: you can't make good AI music. Try all you want. Try the prompt you just wrote. Show and tell. It's not something you're going to be able to do.

Maybe, just maybe, I'm not talking about "my" music tastes, but offering commentary on the state of music at a global scale. Weird that this point was so hard to follow!

China, unlike the US, can look 10 years into the future and consistently execute towards a goal. That's not because of leaders, it's because the systems are fundamentally designed this way.

It's like the two party system in the US. It's because of first past the post in the Constitution. The system is designed to do this, so it does it. The US is designed to be unable to plan or execute long term vision.

Hopefully AI outcompeting humans at slop sparks a renaissance of humans creating truly beautiful human artwork. And if it doesn't, then was anything of value truly lost?

- Outsourcing

False. If you "outsource your code" to a compiler and just write higher level language, you're not an engineer. You literally don't own any of your own code, just an abstraction of it written in human language. See how that works? An engineer can delegate -- period.

- "I wouldn't call myself a software engineer if I got AI to write all the code for me"

If all you do is write code you're not an engineer. I think you fundamentally don't know what engineering is. In a very real sense engineering is what you do when you're not coding. The civil engineer doesn't construct the bridge personally.

- "Secondly, it's not just about "enjoying the journey of construction", it's also about caring about the quality of the end results".

Codemonkeys DON'T CARE about the quality of the end result. They only care about their little corner of the zen garden. Writing real software for real users is by far the worst part of a codemonkeys job.

- "Getting vibe coded software that is as stable as a "bridge that is safe and lasts for a century" is not a matter of careful engineering decisions, it's mostly a matter of luck"

Nonsense. The engineer who spends 90% of his time architecting systems and testing them at a high level is making safer and more stable software than the codemonkey who spends 90% of his time tinkering with the details. Forest for the trees.

- "unless you're doing extensive reviews of the generated code, at which point you greatly diminish the time you're supposedly saving."

Who said anything about "saving time"? We're engineering high quality systems. Some of us spend our time at a higher level, thinking holistically about the system, testing multiple concepts and rapidly iterating. Others demand bespoke handwritten code and in the time allowed can barely finish a single concept with a questionable amount of polish. Whatever their first idea is will ship, and they'll have no real ability to justify the architecture other than vibes.

Of course. I've seen how sloppy and lazy humans are, and I already use the bridge, and if the safety truly came down to the output of single person, then the risk is already significant.

I must say, I got a chuckle at "using AI to do their calculations". Oh no, my agent is going to write a python script to do basic maths, and check their work against a series of automated tests, the sky is falling!

AI has also exposed that many "engineers" are just "people who like fiddling with code" and that's fine in the sense that it makes it clear who are the actual engineers who are engineering solutions to real human problems and who just want to tinker with code.

Like imagine slandering a civil engineer "you just want a bridge that is safe and lasts for a century, you don't care about enjoying the journey of construction".

In my opinion nearly the opposite is true: modern business solves for the "minimum viable quality". What is the absolute lowest quality the software can be and not tank the business.

However, what each domain will tell you (engineering included) is that AI doesn't understand the full context of what you're doing and the point of the business and where to spend effort and where to cut corners. There is definitely still room for competent engineers to iterate here on the solutioning and plans to refine the AI work into something more sturdy.

Although this is only in domains where code quality truly matters. A lot of consumer software without SLA's are just vibe coding full speed now. No code review, AI writing 100% of the code.

Prompt 1: "Research domain, think deeply, and record a full analysis in /docs/TICKET-123-NOTES.md"

Prompt 2: Based on our research, read TICKET-123 and began formulating solutions. Let's think this problem through and come up with multiple potential solutions. Document our solutions in TICKET-123-SOLUTIONS.md

Prompt 3: Based on Solution X, let's formulate a complete plan to implement. Break the work into medium sized tasks that a human could complete in 5-10 hours. Write our plan in TICKET-123-PLAN.md

I've often thought that some of this metadata, such as the research, solutioning and plan could be shared. I think they're valuable for code review. I've also translated these artifacts into other developer documentation paradigms.

But the prompts? You're not getting a lot of value there.

Tesla ""autopilot"" fatalities: 65

Waymo fatalities: 0

I'm okay with the people in charge of building on top of my private information being jailed by very strict, mean sounding, actually-higher-than-you people whose only goal is protecting my information.

Quite frankly, if you changed any word of that, they'd probably be impotent and my data would be toast.