It does feel like an organic process, like I have to intuitively feel the solution for the need I have, can't really use all the shiny things effectively if I don't feel the pain in my bones which they solve.

I've been moving my goldilocks zone a bit towards scheduled tasks simply because I've actually felt the need and pain they solve, more like I have some backburner things I want to take care of but they're so unimportant that I'm unwilling to spend more than 5m here and there thinking about them so I add a scheduled taks every other day which does some leg work, I review for 5 minutes and then forget about it until the next iteration.

I think you're 100% correct that you need to feel the pain that the agent is supposed to solve. It's like trying to explain to a junior the power of Rails if they've never even built a regular static HTML website. It's going to be very difficult for them to understand why things are the way they are.

I'm very allergic to "solutions just because we can". In fact, one way I use AI that may be slightly not-mainstream is that I use AI to actively pursue subtraction that I couldn't otherwise do: cutting down on all my tools I've built over the years, culling cruft: notes, scripts, comments, etc. until I'm left with a smaller footprint of stuff I know is useful.