Comment by senordevnyc

This is just bizarre to me. Do people not use Plan mode?

I start by telling the agent what I'm trying to accomplish, and then I throw in some questions like this, concerns I have, edge cases I've thought about, whatever. It goes out and does all the research, both in my code base and beyond, asks me questions where it needs clarification, and then writes me a plan. I review the plan, we go back and forth a bit with adjustments to the plan, and then the plan is ready for implementation. At that point, the implementation is mostly a formality, because all of the difficult parts are already done.

On top of that, most of what you've described as decisions that need to be made are either trivially made by a frontier model without even needing to be told, or stuff I can bake into my skills so I don't need to specify it on every task.

Given the above, I can't fathom an approach where I'd be faster without AI than with it, because the acceleration is the planning / decision-making, not the implementation. Whether the implementation takes the agent two minutes or six hours really doesn't matter, because I'm not involved at that point.