My whole point is that I don't want it to build an entire feature from one prompt. At most, I want to work with an agent to nail down the spec and then work with an agent that orchestrates the implementation via other agents, same for testing, etc. None of that requires frontier capabilities, it requires a little bit of work on a harness, a little bit more of my input, a little more of my brainpower. I _want_ to build tools that make it work better and don't change when the CC team gins up some default for their harness and foists it on me. I don't see that as a tradeoff at all and I think engaging in my work process more than fire and forget (and literally always in my experience fix stuff later) is more fun and rewarding once the 'holy shit this is now possible' high wears off. Doubly so once the frontier model gets nerfed mid-cycle and now I have to undo the mess because they released v*.x++ and I fell for it again by trusting it to do these agentic tasks without my involvement.
> My whole point is that I don't want it to build an entire feature from one prompt
You are free to do you. But you were asking about why others want the best model.
The answer is, clearly, agentic coding (ie multiple agents each cranking through tasks independently) lets you ship A LOT more business value if used correctly.
Yep. I've tried to use the models to build large things for me. You can't trust the code it produces. Even if it works there are parts that are hot garbage, and will bite you later on. I've found out that having an editor open, asking it to implement things until a certain point, manually fixing some of the worst things it generates, then asking it to expand from there is much better than just prompting a thing and pushing to production.
And hey, don't get me wrong, you can get pretty far with just prompting. But the subtle misses and (I'm looking at you GPT) the overengineered 20k line PRs to do a simple thing are going to cost you a lot if you're not vigilant.
> My whole point is that I don't want it to build an entire feature from one prompt. At most, I want to work with an agent to nail down the spec and then work with an agent that orchestrates the implementation via other agents, same for testing, etc. None of that requires frontier capabilities
I don't think anyone is stopping you. This is an entirely valid way of working.
I for one am glad to leave that behind me. The sooner I never have to write another line of code the better (professional software engineer for nearly 30 years here, for context).