Some mistakes you might be making: Your effort level is too high Your skills are too long You're not aligning before you start work You're aligning too often, and too hard Your automated checks are too lax Your custom tooling is too token-inefficient You aren't doing enough automated review You aren't reviewing previous coding sessions (with an agent) You're doing too much human review You aren't vibe coding enough prototypes Your agent can't verify its own work You're babysitting the agent too much You've overloaded your global steering files Your codebase is hard to navigate You aren't building a shared language Your codebase architecture allows bad tests to be written You aren't thinking strategically enough You aren't thinking enough

Honest reflections from coding with AI so far as a non-engineer: It can get you 70% of the way there, but that last 30% is frustrating. It keeps taking one step forward and two steps backward with new bugs, issues, etc. If I knew how the code worked I could probably fix it myself. But since I don't, I question if I'm actually learning that much.