> The trillion dollar question is how you do this

I don't think it's that hard of a question to answer. I've noticed on my team, our thinking has shifted from how do you directly solve a problem, to how you get an agent to effectively solve the problem and not produce slop in the process.

One thing that we have done that's probably made the biggest impact is alot more upfront architecture with the knowledge that pretty soon agents will be running wild all over the code. Having worked with these agents for a while now, you get a very good sense of how they will go about solving a problem and the various footguns they will encounter along the way. Editing an AGENTS.md file or building a skill is not nearly as fun as coding by hand but it will pay dividends over and over if you do it right.

Another big thing is doing refactoring passes. Early on in our projects our agents generated ALOT of slop and we had to go back and fix alot of it. But every time we did one of these passes, a major aspect was improving agent instructions / skills / etc so it doesn't happen again. It can be a painful process at first but I found that over time, the amount of slop the agent produces goes down by orders of magnitude.

I feel like we're still very much programming, but we're now doing it at a "higher level" where we are not writing the code ourselves but instructing the agent to. And IMHO, properly instructing an agent on a production codebase is not a trivial task.