Trick is to not burn too much time worrying about the perfect skills and this and that. See a lot of people filling skills with LLM junk, or overdoing rules that start confusing the LLM. Just try Vanilla, see something you don't like? Then you make a skill and funnel the LLM to use it for the style of task it's working on. E.g. database work is a mixed bag with LLMs, they tend to do work in totally different styles if you leave them unconstrained.

Agents are unbelievably useful at helping takeover and refactor messy codebases though. I just started taking over this monstrous nightmare of a codebase, truly ancient code the bulk of it written over 10+ years ago in PHP. With the use of Claude / Codex I was able to port over the vast majority of the existing legacy storefront and laid the groundwork for centralizing the 10-20k LOC mega-controller logic over to reusable repo/service patterns.

Just shit that would've taking years previously, is achievable in under a month.

This.

Everything needs an element of human touch, I would somehow only run vanilla things. But if, let’s say, I’m creating backup scripts, I meticulously outline the plan.