This article was a bit confusing for me. It starts off by describing what "doing it wrong" looks like (okay). It then goes on to talk about Agents. Perhaps it's just that my human brain needs a firmware update, but I was expecting the "what doing it wrong looks like" section to be followed by a "what doing it right looks like" section. Instead, the next paragraph just begins with "Agents".

Sure, one could surmise that perhaps "doing it right" means "using Agents", but that's not even how the article reads:

> "To make AI development work for you, you’ll need to provide your AI assistant with two things: the proper context and specific instructions (prompts) on how to behave under certain circumstances."

This, to me, doesn't necessitate the usage of agents, so to then enter a section of agents seems to be skipping over a potentially-implied logical connection between the problem in the "doing it wrong" section and how that is solved in the "Agents" section.

Copying code snippets into web UIs and testing manually is slow and clunky, but Agents are essentially just automations around these same core actions. I feel this article could've made a stronger point by getting at the core of what it means to do it wrong.

• Is "doing it wrong" indicated by the time wasted by not using an agentic mechanism vs manual manipulation?

• Is "doing it wrong" indicated by manually switching between tools instead of using MCP to automate tool delegation?

Having written several non-trivial agents myself using Gemini and OpenAI's APIs, the main difference between handing off a task to an agent and manually copy/pasting into chat UIs is efficiency — I usually first do a task manually using chat UIs, but once I have a pattern established, or have identified a set of tools to validate responses, I can then "agentify" it if it's something I need to do repeatedly. But the quality of both approaches is still dependent on the same core principles: adequate context (no more nor less than what keeps the LLM's attention on the task at hand) and adequate instructions for the task (often with a handful of examples). In this regard, I agree with the author, as correct context + instructions are the key ingredients to a useful response. The agentic element is an efficiency layer on top of those key ingredients which frees up the dev from having to manually orchestrate, and potentially avoids human error (and potentially introduces LLM error).

Am I missing something here?