> My job went from connecting these two things being the hard and reward part, to just mopping up how poorly they’ve been connected.

That’s only half of the transition.

The other half - and when you know you’ve made it through the “AI sux” phase - is when you learn to automate the mopping up. Give the agent the info it needs to know if it did good work - and if it didn’t do good work, give it information so it knows what to fix. Trust that it wants to fix those things. Automate how that info is provided (using code!) and suddenly you are out of the loop. The amount of code needed is surprisingly small and your agent can write it! Hook a few hundred lines of script up to your harness at key moments, and you will never see dumb AI mistakes again (because it fixed them before presenting the work to you, because your script told it about the mistakes while you were off doing something else)

Think of it like linting but far more advanced - your script can walk the code AST and assess anything, or use regex - your agent will make that call when you ask for the script. If the script has an exit code of 2, stderr is shown to the agent! So you (via your script) can print to stderr what the agent did wrong - what line, what file, wha mistake.

It’s what I do every day and it works (200k LOC codebase, 99.5% AI-coded) - there’s info and ideas here: https://codeleash.dev/docs/code-quality-checks

This is just another technique to engineer quality outcomes; you’re just working from a different starting point.