alt Hacker NewsI think one way to approach this is by deliberately choosing less capable tools (but still AI-assisted). You don't have to delegate huge tasks to agents wholesale, but it requires fighting against mainstream harnesses to do so because they exist to sell you more tokens. Model providers are not incentivised to offer less autonomous flows.
I wrote about this frustration a few months ago [1], then realised that if the model providers won't do it perhaps I should try fixing it myself. So, shameless plug klaxon, I wrote an open-source harness that tries to work more like pair programming and less like code review [2].
As usual, my "Show HN" post [3] sank like a stone, so I think perhaps most engineers aren't really interested in this direction. It is possible though, we don't have to just accept whatever tooling the labs throw at us.
[1]: https://philbooth.me/blog/agentic-coding-and-mental-models