alt Hacker NewsI've found that setting good guardrails, and running in a sandbox so that the agent doesn't keep asking tedious permission questions, makes things go a LOT smoother.
Generally, I spend anywhere between 15 mins and an hour setting things up (depending on how well the project is set up for AI work), and then set the agent going, coming back in a half-hour to an hour to check its progress. Generally, the tooling keeps it honest (for golang, forbidigo is AWESOME). 80% of the questions the agent asks me require a lot of thought. 20% of what it does needs correction.
The other thing to remember with LLMs is that they are NOT human, and won't react in a human way. So you'll see strikes of "brilliance" followed by the absolutely bizarre. But good guardrails keep that to a minimum.
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How often are you going into new projects and spending up to an hour on set up? I'm really just asking to get a sense of what "Generally" means here.
It doesn't change the premise.
AI should be assisting us, instead it's doing the job and it's us being an assistant to it. This is a monumental shift that people seem to be missing in how knowledge working is changing and it's going beyond mere coding.
Guardrails, prompts, whatever, it's us helping it doing the job, not the other way around.
Opus 4.6 was the last genuinely good assistant LLM, but since then it's quite clear that the training/reinforcement is focused "given prompt -> do task" so it's behavior is more and more about doing it itself, not helping you. If you try to use it as an assistant it just sucks and is perma wired into finding the solution. Many times I want it to help me investigate, and his answer will still be focused on the fix, not answering my questions.
4.7 first, 4.8 later and fable are absolute disasters as assistants.
Fable in particular is so "intelligent" that it will push with very strong and intelligent takes even if it is completely wrong.
I have never disliked our job more.
Your experience pretty much mirrors my own. I hate to be the 'they're holding it wrong' guy but there's certainly a lot of people out there that have no real idea how to effectively leverage AI.
> sandbox so that the agent doesn't keep asking tedious permission questions
> 80% of the questions the agent asks me require a lot of thought. 20% of what it does needs correction.
I've found even the permissions questions give me veto power over fruitless lines of exploration, especially in planning mode. For instance, it wants to use tools I don't have installed to access information that I have made available elsewhere? I get a chance to override this decision by declining the permissions check and redirecting it. Feels tedious, but helps me understand what information sources are influencing it. I head off a lot of bugs this way.