Really enjoyed this, especially the part about learning how to get an agent to do what I would do—it resonated strongly with me and mirrors my own experience:
Instead of giving up, I forced myself to reproduce all my manual commits with agentic ones. I literally did the work twice. I’d do the work manually, and then I’d fight an agent to produce identical results in terms of quality and function (without it being able to see my manual solution, of course).