[weiliddat]

> Often, it takes 5-6 broken crappy versions of a thing until you understand that. There is no accelerating the 5-6 broken crappy versions - there’s no agent tech that’s going to help your meat brain avoid thinking time.

Fully agreed. Though I found that, once I found a harness (prompt + skills + model) that I trust to do most things the way I like it, it has sped up the coding/exploration part of that process.

Although the iterations are faster, it's still taking me almost the same amount of effort to go through those crappy versions, because I still need to understand and adjust my mental model of what ideas, principles, design apply for the solution, and what to try next.

So, in the end, I do feel like I'm expending more mental effort in a shorter amount of time (with some effort saved on writing the code, which wasn't that much to begin with once you're proficient). It's a weird feeling, like I'm "only" prompting and reading code, but I feel equally mentally spent, or sometimes more because of the compressed iteration cycle.