The anecdote is compelling, but there's an interesting measurement gap. METR ran a randomized controlled trial with experienced open-source developers — they were actually 19% slower with AI assistance, but self-reported being 24% faster. A ~40 point perception gap.
Doesn't mean the tools aren't useful — it means we're probably measuring the wrong thing. "Prompt engineering" was always a dead end that obscured the deeper question: the structure an AI operates within — persistent context, feedback loops, behavioral constraints — matters more than the model or the prompts you feed it. The real intelligence might be in the harness, not the horse.
Respectfully, was this comment AI generated? It has all the signs.
And scaffolding does matter a lot, but mostly because the models just got a lot better and the corresponding scaffolding for long running tasks hasn't really caught up yet.