What to build instead of AI agents

The way I use AI today is by keeping a pretty tight leash on it, a la Claude Code and Cursor. Not because the models aren't good enough, but because I like to weigh in frequently to provide taste and direction. Giving the AI more agency isn't necessarily desirable, because I want to provide that taste.

Maybe that'll change as I do more and new ergonomics reveal themselves, but right now I don't really want AI that's too agentic. Otherwise, I kind of lose connection to it.

The old adage still applies: there is no free lunch. It makes sense that LLMs are not going to be able to take humans entirely out of the loop.

Think about what it would mean if that were the case: if people, on the basis of a few simple prompts could let the agents loose and create sophisticated systems without any further input, the there would be nothing to differentiate those systems, and thus they would lose their meaning and value.

If prompting is indeed the new level of abstraction we are working at, then what value is added by asking Claude: make me a note-taking app? A million other people could also issue this same low-effort prompt; thus what is the value added here by the prompter?