7777777phil is right that the AGENTS.md file is the actual differentiator. But it's also a manual workaround for a real gap — there's no structured way for agents to carry context across sessions. Each session starts cold. You're hand-maintaining the agent's long-term memory in a markdown file.

The tooling around agents matters as much as the agents themselves. A model that produces excellent code but can't track what it assumed or skipped is only half a system.

one of the takeaways I get when reading skilled engineers' experiences with these tools is that they essentially offer leverage, and the more skill someone already has the higher their ceiling will be

I use Claude and other models frequently (mostly via Cursor, with a smattering of other tools) in my work now. It is not at the "I never write code myself" point, but the AI tools are absolutely capable of generating highly effective and usable code, usually nearly as good or as good as what I'd do myself, with guidance.

It hasn't eliminated the need for my existence as an engineer, but it has changed it drastically. It is much more like "tell the computer what I want and mostly get it" than it was a year ago.

And yet, I have friends and colleagues who reject it out of hand as useless, and are so skeptical of it that they suggest it must only be good because my skills are poor, or our codebase is bad, or I'm getting lucky.

I just can't totally credit any of those explanations anymore.