Something I do quite a lot is throwing back and forth a discussion over a particular piece of code, usually provided with little to no context (because that's my task to worry about), hammering it until we get that functionality correct, then presenting it with broader context to fit it in (or I simply do that part by hand).

Here is how I don't use it: As an agent that gets broad goals that he is supposed to fulfill on its own.

Why? Because the time and effort I have to invest to ensure that the output of an agentic system is in line with what I actually try to accomplish, is simply too much, for all the reasons outlined in this excellent article.

Ironically, this is even more true, since using AI as an incredibly capable writing assistant, already speeds up my workflow considerably. So in a way, less agentic AI empowers me in a way that makes me more critical of the additional time I'd have to invest to play around the quirks of agentic AI.

This is the trick. Human in the loop, not human hiding in an ivory tower after uttering a single command. This is ~effectively what I see a lot of shops doing right now:

"Clean up the codebase please. Apply best practices :D. OH. By the way, heres a laundry list of 100 things to NOT do: ".

I get a lot more uplift out of use cases like:

"Please generate a custom Stream implementation that is read-only and sources bytes from an underlying chunked representation. Mock the chunk loading part. Primarily demonstrate the ReadAsync method and transition logic between chunks."