While I believe you're probably right that getting any productivity gains from these tools requires an investment, I think calling the process "engineering" is really stretching the meaning of the word. It's really closer to ritual magic than any solid engineering practices at this point. People have guesses and practices that may or may not actually work for them (since measuring productivity increases is difficult if not impossible), and they teach others their magic formulas for controlling the demon.

My issue is not with learning. This "tool" has an incredibly shallow learning curve. My issue is that I'm having to make way for these "tools" that everyone says vastly increases productivity but seems to just churn out tech-debt as quickly as it can write it.

It a large leap to "requires engineering and planning" when no one even in this thread can seem to agree on the behavior of any of these "tools". Some comments tell anecdotes of not getting the agents to listen until the context of the whole world is laid out in these md files. Others say the only way is to keep the context tight and focused, going so far as to have written _yet more tools_ to remove and re-add code comments so they don't "poison" the context.

I am slightly straw-manning, but the tone in this thread has already shifted from a few months ago where these "tools" were going to immediately give huge productivity gains but now you're telling me they need 1) their own special files everywhere (again, this isn't even agreed on) and 2) "engineering and planning...not done in days or weeks even

The entire economy is propped up on this tech right now and no one can even agree on whether it's effective or how to use it properly? Not to mention the untold damage it is doing to learning outcomes.

>> [..] and it may not even be relevant anymore next year.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Yeah I feel like on average I still spend a similar amount of time developing but drastically less time fixing obscure bugs, because once it codes the feature and I describe the bugs it fixed them, the rest of my times spent testing and reviewing code.

Learning how to equip a local LLM with tools it can use to interact with to extend its capabilities has been a lot of fun for me and is a great educational experience for anyone who is interested. Just another tool for the toolchest.