[Nextgrid]

The role of a software engineer is to condense the (often unclear) requirements, business domain knowledge, existing code (if any) and their skills/experience into a representation of the solution in a very concise language: a programming language.

Having to instead express all that (including the business-related part, since the agent has no context of that) in a verbose language (English) feels counter-productive, and is counter-productive in my experience.

I've successfully one-shotted easy self-contained, throwaway tasks ("make me a program that fills Redis with random keys and values" - Claude will one-shot that) but when it comes to working with complex existing codebases I've never seen the benefits - having to explain all the context to the agent and correcting its mistakes takes longer than just doing it myself (worse, it's unpredictable - I know roughly how long something will take, but it's impossible to tell in advance whether an agent will one-shot it successfully or require longer babysitting than just doing it manually from the beginning).