This is actually an aspect of using AI tools I really enjoy: Forming an educated intuition about what the tool is good at, and tastefully framing and scoping the tasks I give it to get better results.

It cognitively feels very similar to other classic programming activities, like modularization at any level from architecture to code units/functions, thoughtfully choosing how to lay out and chunk things. It's always been one of the things that make programming pleasurable for me, and some of that feeling returns when slicing up tasks for agents.

I agree that framing and scoping tasks is becoming a real joy. The great thing about this strategy is there's a point at which you can scope something small enough that it's hard for the AI to get it wrong and it's easy enough for you as a human to comprehend what it's done and verify that it's correct.

I'm starting to think of projects now as a tree structure where the overall architecture of the system is the main trunk and from there you have the sub-modules, and eventually you get to implementations of functions and classes. The goal of the human in working with the coding agent is to have full editorial control of the main trunk and main sub-modules and delegate as much of the smaller branches as possible.

Sometimes you're still working out the higher-level architecture, too, and you can use the agent to prototype the smaller bits and pieces which will inform the decisions you make about how the higher-level stuff should operate.