The main thing that was dumbing me down (and burning me out) was having to babysit LLMs on anything except basic tasks if I care about code quality/structure/maintainability.
I love coding, it always felt like Legos for adults. Not that Legos aren't also Legos for adults.
But there's no fighting the fact that we won't be writing 99% of the code anymore so I take pleasure in crafting the specs and requirements clearly, that's where I put the effort.
And then to avoid having to babysit the agents to get them to stick to the plan, I built a super robust external orchestrator that forces multiple review and fix rounds until I get the result I want.
I'll be fully open sourcing that soon also https://engine.build