I felt that way initially. It is also a headache when you invest a lot in that and need to continually test ripping that stuff out as new models come out. Or in the case of opus 5, Anthropic says ditch it entirely and trust it.

But there is another aspect which I do enjoy which is closer to the feeling of dialing in key bindings in vim or getting a really good rhythm going with your vscode extensions or zhs plugins. It is that level of "I want my system to do exactly this thing in exactly this way" customization that a lot of technical people crave.

And you can do it with harness and context engineering in many cases. In other cases it introduces friction because it will be like "cool, I will only output 15 words max unless told otherwise" and then in the next turn completely disregards it with an "oops, you did tell me to do that didn't you."

And that frustration compounds when older model versions may have done a better job of that but new models are like "thank you for your suggestion, your opinion, while appreciated, is irrelevant. Now let me get back to overspending on your token budget. "