Thanks for the clarification, this is such a spot on response that actually mirrors my experience considerably.

> unless you hold their hand in the form of a prompt, skill, or direct instruction.

The hand-holding and inability to execute automated tasks is a very well known failure mode.

The requirement for me to prod, redirect and continuously steer is the number one pitfall when I did the Muse Open Kernel challenge using a long-horizon search/improvement swarm (or whatever the term is... just don't call it 'RSI').

Using plateau avoidance techniques such as https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07447 and building harnesses around these is what helped me.