Same task. Two ways of asking. Two very different results. That was the moment it clicked for me, and it has bugged me ever since.
I gave my AI coding agent something to do, got back work that was fine but not good, rephrased the request, and got back exactly what I wanted. Nothing else changed. Same model, same repo, same afternoon. The only variable was me, and how I happened to frame it.
The model was fine. I was the variable.
That is an uncomfortable thing to admit, because it means the quality of my output was riding on whether I remembered the right way to ask on any given day. On a good day I pointed the agent at the failure log first, told it to reproduce before fixing, reminded it of the pattern we already use. On a distracted day I forgot half of that and got half the result.
The knowledge of how to do the work well existed. It just lived in my head, and only when I was paying attention. Nowhere I could reuse it. Nowhere anyone else could either.
