But here's the rub - if you want your clanker to do those steps, it's usually a simple matter of adding them to your AGENTS.md and then it always does them.

I'm a big fan of the characterization step step being added. And it can be reasonable to add this before or even after the fact as a commit prior to your actual commit (assuming you're familiar with using tools where that's easy to do - e.g. jj or git with rebase). And the agents can do this - they just don't tend to without you saying to do so.

A lot of engineering practice comes from choosing which elements are reasonable to use given the context of what you're building. Providing that is your job. When you do that poorly, you get poor results. But garbage in garbage out has always been a thing. Any advanced automation amplifies ambient assumptions