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.