Yes, it's essentially the Pareto principle [0]. The LLM community has conflated the 80% as difficult complicated work, when it was essentially boilerplate. Allegedly LLMs have saved us from that drudgery, but I personally have found that (without the complicated setups you mention) the 80% done project that gets one shot is in reality more like 50% done because it is built on an unstable foundation, and that final 20% involves a lot of complicated reworking of the code. There's still plenty of value but I think it is less than proponents would want you to believe.

Anecdotally, I have found that even if you type out paragraph after paragraph describing everything you need the agent to take care of, it eventually feels like you could have written a lot of the code yourself with the help of a good IDE by the time you can finally send your prompt off.

- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

Yeah, my mental model at this point is there’s two components to building a system: writing the code and understanding the system. When you’re the one writing the code, you get the understanding at the same time. When you’re not, you still need to put in that work to deeply grok the system. You can do it ahead of time while writing the prompts, you can do it while reviewing the code, you can do it while writing the test suite, or you can do it when the system is on fire during an outage, but the work to understand the system can’t be outsourced to the LLM.