I've been building software with AI agents every day for months. The biggest thing I've learned has nothing to do with which model or which tool is hot this week. Its this: most people's AI output is flat. Every task starts from zero. The agent is just as sharp and just as forgetful as it was last week.
Kieran Klaassen and Dan Shipper at Every gave this problem a name - compound engineering. The idea is almost stupidly simple: each piece of work should make the next one easier, not harder. They run several products with basically single-person eng teams on the back of it. Once you feel the difference its really hard to go back.
It's usually drawn as a four step loop. Plan, work, assess, compound.
Plan - before a line of code, the agents go read the codebase, the conventions, the framework versions, and hand you a plan you correct.
Work - the plan drives the build. The agent writes the feature and the tests.
