What to build instead of AI agents

I'm not yet convinced (though I remain open to the idea) that AI agents are going to be a widely adopted pattern in the way people on LinkedIn suggest.

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.

Do you think that, over time, knowing how the models behave, simply providing more/better context and instructions can fill this gap of wanting to provide taste and direction to the models’ outputs and actions?

My experience is that, for many workflows, well-done “prompt engineering” is more than enough to make AI models behave more like we’d like without constantly needing us to weight in.

I suppose it's possible, although the models would have to have a really nuanced understanding about my tastes and even then it seems doubtful.

If we use a real world analogy, think of someone like an architect designing your house. I'm still going to be heavily involved in the design of my house, regardless of how skilled and tasteful the architect is. It's fundamentally an expression of myself - delegating that basically destroys the point of the exercise. I feel the same for a lot of the stuff I'm building with AI now.

Can you share some examples of things you’ve been building with AI?

From your comments, I’d venture a guess that you see your AI-assisted work as a creative endeavor — an expression of your creativity.

I certainly wouldn’t get my hopes up for AI to make innovative jokes, poems and the like. Yet for things that can converge on specific guidelines for matters of taste and preferences, like coding, I’ve been increasingly impressed by how well AI models adapt to our human wishes, even when expressed in ever longer prompts.

I use AI for coding - most of the projects I've built have been fun toys (chore tracking apps, Flutter apps to help my parents), but I've also built one commercial money making app.

I do agree - the models have good taste and often do things that delight me, but there's always room for me to inject my taste. For example, I don't want the AI to choose what state management solution I use for my Flutter app because I have strong opinions about that.