The analogy did not connect with me because I am the Home Depot shopper who buys the 13-sensor stud finder, a second one for redundancy, and the third one because I eventually misplace the first.

Mirrors my shotgun approach to AI. Keep trying and stick with whatever works.

Sounds like your two AI developers are BOTH CORRECT. One figured out how to use AI tools and the other ... not so much. That said, "AI as tool" is already an outdated paradigm. Part of the new paradigm is "AI as research assistant". Current vanilla AI instances is not remotely qualified to be a research assistant. They need persistent COMPARTMENTALIZED memory, they need a mechanism to maintain alignment under acceleration, and they need a mechanism to remain truthful. If any one of those three orthogonal governance layers fail then the system will fail.

Here's how we accomplished this: https://energyscholar.github.io/persistent-ai-collaboration/