Learning how to drive the models is a legit skill - and I don't mean "prompt engineering". There are absolutely techniques that help and because things are moving fast there is little established practice to draw from. But it's also been interesting seeing experienced coders struggle - I've found my time as a manager has been more help to me than my time as a coder. How to keep people on task and focused etc is very similar to managing humans. I suspect much of the next 5 years will be people rediscovering existing human and project management techniques and rebranding them as AI something.

Some techniques I've found useful recently:

- If the agent struggled on something once it's done I'll ask it "you were struggling here, think about what happened and if there are is anything you learned. Put this into a learnings document and reference it in agents.md so we don't get stuck next time"

- Plans are a must. Chat to the agent back and forth to build up a common understanding of the problem you want solved. Make sure to say "ask me any follow up questions you think are necessary". This chat is often the longest part of the project - don't skimp on it. You are building the requirements and if you've ever done any dev work you understand how important having good requirements are to the success of the work. Then ask the model to write up the plan into an implementation document with steps. Review this thoroughly. Then use a new agent to start work on it. "Implement steps 1-2 of this doc". Having the work broken down into steps helps to be able to do work more pieces (new context windows). This part is the more mindless part and where you get to catch up on reading HN :)

- The GitHub Copilot chat agent is great. I don't get the TUI folks at all. The Pro+ plan is a reasonable price and can do a lot with it (Sonnet, Codex, etc all available). Being able to see the diffs as it works is helpful (but not necessary) to catch problems earlier.