I largely agree with this piece but the author isn't really giving the AI development process a fair shot. It's not a matter of "prompt better" but of establishing processes that account for and correct agent shortcomings.

For me, it's taken thousands of dollars and months of experiments to get a process that produces working and maintainable code. You can't just go in with $10 and be like "Wow it doesn't work" after playing around with it for 30 seconds, which is how far $10 takes you on models that are doing work. All that does is expose the shortcomings that need correction.

You can get around these not by just "prompting better", but by establishing rules and pipelines that are enforced with standard software engineering tools like compilers, linters, type checkers, borrow checkers, profilers, benchmarking, smoke tests, proof assistants, and so forth. Those things we know work really well, so AI coding shouldn't be viewed as AI doing all the work, but AI orchestrating all of the tools that we know work so well in software development.

The magic of agentic engineering is only possible because our software tools are so good not because agents are.