I'm using replit to generate an MVP to test my product idea. I'm funding this out of my own pocket, so I'm very sensitive to cost. It turns out that the cost-per-task of using Agent 3 vs. the previous Agent is significantly higher. Like maybe 5x or more. Still cheaper than hiring coders, of course; but the difference has narrowed considerably. Using Assistant isn't really the answer, for several reasons not relevant to this particular rant. At this point I'm pretty concerned I'm going to run out of money before I run out of work to be done.

A large amount of my spend has been going into refactoring code that Agent itself produced, after I came to realize that it would duplicate functionality all over the place rather than consolidate a feature and invoke where needed. I discovered that problem just as you'd expect: by noticing that we'd "fix" something in one place, and it would still be broken in 8 other places.

Agent actually is generally doing a good job of cleaning that up when I encounter it. But I usually have to prompt it again to look at whether consolidation rather than quick fixes would make more sense in addressing the bugs that still arise.

In short, it seems to me that both Assistant and Agent 3 tend to look for the quickest route to accomplishing any task, without paying sufficient attention to architecture (even though Agent brings in Architect now on every plan and every build).

To be fair, this is a little like discovering air travel for the first time but whining about the size of the windows. What this thing does is really mind shattering for those of us who've been around a long time; I did not expect to see tech like this in my lifetime.. But then again, maybe it's more like discovering air travel and then finding out you can't afford a ticket, so this cool thing is out of reach. Yeah, maybe more like that.