I’m willing to be wrong but this industry-wide emphasis on AI creative/coding workflows seems way over-engineered.

Ime successful creative execution looks like micro-iterations where each output informs the next creative move.

I can build something incredibly fast from essentially caveman grunt instructions through an LLM harness, iterating as I go.

Optimizing for feeding a huge plan to an agent sounds to me like a net waste of time. And looking over the shoulder of industry peers trying to do this, I don’t see their outputs or throughput some remarkable improvement over what I can produce with minimal fanfare usage.

Yeah it's wild watching so many people decide waterfall is great all of a sudden.

LLMs are too flaky for high quality code. On tougher problems it's very common for an LLM to contradict itself and run in circles. It simply doesn't know what the right thing is, but on each turn it is super confident to do the right thing.

Maybe I've chosen hardmode to learn C with LLM assistance, plus my pet project turned out to be a bit less trivial then anticipated. But I know that I have to think three times about my choices how to deal with C problems and seeing how a LLM struggles to give reasonable answers is a a huge red flag and forces me to think about it a fourth time.

Doing all this with a fast autonomous workflow with just little user guidance is asking for trouble.

100% agree. Took me ages of working with the agents to circle back around this, which was the best way to get work done before AI automation anyways.

For me it's usually that I start with a single agent, but then I won't have anything to do while it is churning and I have other ideas/features that keep building up that I want to do, so I need to scale, and while I'm scaling I need to start to have those workflows, so eventually I end up with many agents, most which are autonomous working on their own worktrees, but I will have a specific agent that I will talk to more iteratively.

So e.g. I may have 1 agent that I ask and iterate on with directly, and 9 agents that work separately on their own.

I will utilize this 1 agent on features I care most about and want to guide and iterate on in as much detail as possible.

I suspect that letting agents spin away unattended for long stretches of time will become less and less popular as more and more companies blow their token budgets and start requiring some answers to difficult questions before agreeing to further loose the purse strings.

The trick is to have 5 of those huge plans running in parallel.

I agree. I have gotten an incredible amount of work done iterating with 5-30 minute long agent tasks. But it requires I stay engaged, and not go chill on the beach, which I guess is a lot of agentmaxxers’ goal.

you do not need micro iterations. you can set macro goals and let the agent/LLM/model whatever you want to call it figure it out.

it works.