Also C++ engineer, but from my perspective, for large tasks, agentic coding is still lacking no matter how well I describe desired output. So in that cases I fall back to manual coding and cursor tab helps a lot with boring parts
I actually don't let AI take on large tasks beyond test writing and refactoring helper scripts/utils. I keep it on a very short leash for driver/middleware code since the quality bar needs to be extremely high for our codebase. Up until recently I didn't even trust it for that, but some experiments show it's fairly good and even detected issues outside of the refactored functions which I did let it touch. This is with a good amount of 'thought engineering' though where I try to think hard about how to emphasize certain factors and define the problem as best I can.
Define "large tasks".
I actually don't let AI take on large tasks beyond test writing and refactoring helper scripts/utils. I keep it on a very short leash for driver/middleware code since the quality bar needs to be extremely high for our codebase. Up until recently I didn't even trust it for that, but some experiments show it's fairly good and even detected issues outside of the refactored functions which I did let it touch. This is with a good amount of 'thought engineering' though where I try to think hard about how to emphasize certain factors and define the problem as best I can.