It's not empowering to hand off the details

I've been vibecoding a ton for the past 9 months, built a bunch of cool little apps for myself with AI, ran experiments, built an entire SDLC on skills, did the agent orchestration harness thing, etc. In the past few weeks I've hit a wall where I'm just tired of it. Each model becomes more independent but also harder to direct in detail. They produce massive, tedious, sloppy text outputs with very little input. They're bad at socializing knowledge and communicating design forks.

The places where I've seen unequivocal wins with AI are repetitive tech debt tasks that apply the same transformation across a large amount of code or refactor under a pre-existing test suite with good coverage. It's great for initial research, brainstorming, and can be good (despite the sycophancy) as a rubber duck conversation partner. I use AI constantly, for work and in my personal time, but we've hit a ceiling where I no longer find it helpful for the models to absorb more of the intellectual labor. They get things wrong more aggressively, and more elaborately. They're inadequately curious. I cannot keep up with the endless bad technical writing, and it makes it harder to spot factual errors and bad reasoning.

Here's what I want: I want AI as an assistant that helps me make decisions, and ensures that I'm in the driver's seat. AI as an over-confident prodigy on speed is what we're getting lately, and it's losing me.

You develop a taste as to what details you can skim and what you need to dive on. We are all trained on this due to doing 10000 wax on wax off movements, called a "PR Review". I used to scrutinize. Now I think "yep that bit looks good and tests will catch errors plus I can manually test. This bit over here looks scary will spend time more deeply understanding".

With AI you don't need to understand every line in depth but it does need good judgement to decide which.

It is all about abstraction, and basic English is a quite bad abstraction

All details are not created equal.

Some details are boring.

My AI dream (that I’m living happily) is getting to focus on the details that I find interesting and ignoring all the boilerplate details that modern software requires.

Every word of this seems objectively false. AI is more than capable of handling the details. I have generated countless tools for myself without needing to know or care about the details.

> to become good at the thing in the first place requires a complete reversal of the mindset that would lead one to having wanted to hand it off

Is this true? I can be good at something and be happy to not have to do it anymore I feel

This same argument could be applied to anything. Layers of abstraction exist for a reason, because at a certain point, we can only deal with so many things at once. We have to be able to delegate "the details" to others -- be that a person, a company, or an AI model.

Does "not getting into the details" mean you have to understand how the GCC compiler works when you write C code? Do you need to be an expert in machine code, or how SSE and pipelined instruction caches work to write your little bit of code? Do you need to understand how Ethernet frames work to write an API route for a web server?

Knowing how these things work can be helpful in a broader sense, and perhaps when encountering weird edge cases or dealing with exotic implementation but are generally not required to get the job done. The details, simply put, don't matter because someone else has already thought through the problem and solved it in a way that is good enough for the vast majority of use cases.

The same goes with AI. It's helpful to know how things work, but as the models continue to get better and better, it doesn't matter. As long as they are trained properly by someone who does know the details, that's a far better place to be than training a million different people on it who will each have their own biases, levels of understanding and misconceptions.

CEOs, serial entrepreneurs, managers etc all seem to find it pretty empowering.

I treat my Ais like employees, pizza party and all.

it depends on what you mean by power and details and handing off and whom you are handing them to and what you are getting handed in return and your counterparty's relationship to these things and the extent to which you measure things in the same way as one another.

We're living in the glorious future where software engineers don't have to worry about nitty-gritty stuff like actually making software and can focus on the really important work: administrative and managerial tasks!