Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What separates a useful agent from an expensive one Most teams adopt an AI coding agent the same way they adopted autocomplete: open the tool, type a request, hope. That is the wrong mental model, and it is why so many developers quietly conclude the hype is overblown. An agent is not a faster keyboard. It is a junior teammate that works exactly as well as the brief, the context and the review process you give it. Get those three things right and the same model that felt gimmicky last quarter starts shipping real pull requests. Workflow beats model choice. The gap between a casual user and a deliberate one is far larger than the gap between two frontier models. Context is the input that matters. An agent cannot read your intentions — show it the code, the constraints and the known…
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