I look forward to when tooling around AI agents has standardized to solve the common frustrations. One of those is trust that the reality of what it creates matches the plan we refined together.

The features the agent & I are building get loaded into my mental model of the codebase, and each time I hit a situation where it only applied a concept to 1/2 the places it should have, I lose trust and feel like I have to spend even more time at each stage verifying every little piece. It’s the difference between handing a task to your competent coworker, vs giving the task to that one architect you wouldn’t trust to install a CLI tool by themselves. One of them gets a LGTM, the other I will dig through with a fine-toothed comb.

While there are a bazillion approaches people might say would have solved this for me (cue the BMAD, Speckit, etc crowd), I believe software engineers will eventually settle on a standard toolkit, in the same way most people use NPM. There are other options to provide competition, but we aren’t all building our own package managers.