[lemax]

I've tried all the Q&A skills, confidence meters and little hacks to get agents to clarify and propose better solutions. Clarification and planning has gotten a lot better using some skills (e.g. obra/superpowers), but counterproposals and negative feedback are rarely up to snuff with something a staff level colleague would come up with - this seems to be amplified when you already have an extensive PRD or plan together. If a plan is already fleshed out but is inefficient or contains some anti-patterns, I've had better results just throwing these out, taking what I've learned and summarizing tradeoffs in a brand new chat.

Once you have a comprehensive plan together, or a fairly full context window, agents have a lot of issues zooming out. This is particularly painful in some coding agents since they're loading your existing code into context and get weighted down heavily by what already exists (which makes them good at other tasks) vs. what may be significantly simpler and better for net-new stuff or areas of your codebase that are more nascent.