This is essentially what I've been comparing it to as well. You are laying out and being responsible for the overall direction, architecture, and how things should work at a high level but then delegating the implementation and lower importance decisions to the agents. It very much at times feels like managing a bunch of developers and coordinating them all toward the vision in my head. I've developed an intuition of sorts where I can quickly tell if something is being done incorrectly just by looking at the snippets agents show me and the questions they ask.
As engineers our job is to solve problems at various levels of abstraction. Developers that think we are just automating away our own jobs have missed the point. It's not about writing the code anymore, it's about designing solutions to problems and distilling that to agents in a way that achieves the outcome you wanted. Models are not good at coming up with this direction on their own, nor are they good at designing cohesive user experiences across a plane of complexity. These two areas require most of my time now while actually writing the code has been delegated away.
As engineers our job is to solve problems at various levels of abstraction. Developers that think we are just automating away our own jobs have missed the point. It's not about writing the code anymore, it's about designing solutions to problems and distilling that to agents in a way that achieves the outcome you wanted. Models are not good at coming up with this direction on their own, nor are they good at designing cohesive user experiences across a plane of complexity. These two areas require most of my time now while actually writing the code has been delegated away.