> often a benefit to having a human have an understanding of the concrete details of the system

Further elaborating from my experience.

1. I think we're in the early stages, where agents are useful because we still know enough to coach well - knowledge inertia.

2. I routinely make the mistake of allowing too much autonomy, and will have to spend time cleaning up poor design choices that were either inserted by the agent, or were forced upon it because I had lost lock on the implementation details (usually both in a causal loop!)

I just have a policy of moving slowly and carefully now through the critical code, vs letting the agent steer. They have overindexed on passing tests and "clean code", producing things that cause subtle errors time and time again in a large codebase.

> burn the time to understand it.

It seems to me to be self-evident that writing produces better understanding than reading. In fact, when I would try to understand a difficult codebase, it often meant that probing+rewriting produced a better understanding than reading, even if those changes were never kept.