I see people spending so much time creating "workflow" skills that have no benchmark whatsoever to prove they are any more effective than plain one sentence prompts.

This takes me back to the era of object oriented programming and UML diagrams. More time was spent framing the solution than implementing it. Is there maybe one more design pattern that could be applied? And when the time to implement came, all those diagrams were mostly in the way. But doing it was fun, since it allowed you to focus on the fun, big picture and skip the nitty gritty details that were actually hard to solve.

I feel like people are going down that slippery slope with harnesses and skills and what not. With the right prompt, and with the right model, and with a sprinkle of magic, the solution will emerge. Oh, it didn't? Let's see if there's a new model available, or if someone has come up with a new clever skill or something. Maybe then... Because actually solving annoying problems is not fun, even less so now that the code is a black box only the LLM can understand.

This 1000x.

At the same time, the lack of this makes it then very easy for me to tune out harness noise.

It reminds me of people customizing their nvim configs all day, thinking they're being productive but not getting all that much done.

This is so frustrating to me. Ever heard of the planner agent reviewer agent and the tester agent framework?

I'm not sure if that's what you mean but I know many that are making their own flow like this and think that this brings in a higher level of performance..