All details are not created equal.

Some details are boring.

My AI dream (that I’m living happily) is getting to focus on the details that I find interesting and ignoring all the boilerplate details that modern software requires.

Every word of this seems objectively false. AI is more than capable of handling the details. I have generated countless tools for myself without needing to know or care about the details.

> to become good at the thing in the first place requires a complete reversal of the mindset that would lead one to having wanted to hand it off

Is this true? I can be good at something and be happy to not have to do it anymore I feel

it depends on what you mean by power and details and handing off and whom you are handing them to and what you are getting handed in return and your counterparty's relationship to these things and the extent to which you measure things in the same way as one another.

You develop a taste as to what details you can skim and what you need to dive on. We are all trained on this due to doing 10000 wax on wax off movements, called a "PR Review". I used to scrutinize. Now I think "yep that bit looks good and tests will catch errors plus I can manually test. This bit over here looks scary will spend time more deeply understanding".

With AI you don't need to understand every line in depth but it does need good judgement to decide which.

CEOs, serial entrepreneurs, managers etc all seem to find it pretty empowering.

I treat my Ais like employees, pizza party and all.

We're living in the glorious future where software engineers don't have to worry about nitty-gritty stuff like actually making software and can focus on the really important work: administrative and managerial tasks!

I've been vibecoding a ton for the past 9 months, built a bunch of cool little apps for myself with AI, ran experiments, built an entire SDLC on skills, did the agent orchestration harness thing, etc. In the past few weeks I've hit a wall where I'm just tired of it. Each model becomes more independent but also harder to direct in detail. They produce massive, tedious, sloppy text outputs with very little input. They're bad at socializing knowledge and communicating design forks.

The places where I've seen unequivocal wins with AI are repetitive tech debt tasks that apply the same transformation across a large amount of code or refactor under a pre-existing test suite with good coverage. It's great for initial research, brainstorming, and can be good (despite the sycophancy) as a rubber duck conversation partner. I use AI constantly, for work and in my personal time, but we've hit a ceiling where I no longer find it helpful for the models to absorb more of the intellectual labor. They get things wrong more aggressively, and more elaborately. They're inadequately curious. I cannot keep up with the endless bad technical writing, and it makes it harder to spot factual errors and bad reasoning.

Here's what I want: I want AI as an assistant that helps me make decisions, and ensures that I'm in the driver's seat. AI as an over-confident prodigy on speed is what we're getting lately, and it's losing me.