When software engineers become agent herders their day-to-day starts to resemble more that of a manager than that of an engineer.
* thinking about the big picture * knowing how you can verify that the code match the big picture.
In both case, somtimes you are happily surprised, sometimes you discover that the things you told 3 times the one writing code to do was still not done.
Management is not "engineering."
To clarify, by "dirty work on my pet project" , I meant ,spending times to fix some compilation issues that after 2 hours you told yourself "damnit, I forgot this!" , or when you want to adapt your old python project from python2 to python3.
And I didn't even talked about managment itself.
But , thinking about the big picture, telling claude code to not use this but that. To not overengineer etc. is engineering in my book, and what I've been been doing for the last 8 years at least with more junior engineers.