I agree, and I think this means there is a lot of space for trying new things. I think cursor was a small glimpse in trying to fix the split between purely GitHub copilot line revision (this interrupts my thoughts too much) and calling in for help via a chat window that you're copying and pasting from.
I think this post shows there could be a couple levels of indirection, some kind of combination of the "overarching design doc" that is injected into every prompt, and a more tactical level syntax/code/process that we have with something like a chat window that is code aware. I've definitely done some crazy stuff by just asking something really stupid like "Is there any way to speed this up?" and Claude giving me some esoteric pandas optimization that gave me a 100x speedup.
I think overall the tools have crazy variance in quality of output, but I think with some "multifacet prompting", ie, code styling, design doc, architect docs, constraints, etc you might end up with something that is much more useful.