The control plane is already operational and does what I need. Copying public designs solved a few problems I didn't even know I had (awkward command and control UX) and seems strictly superior to what I had before. I could have taken a lot longer on this - probably at least a week, to "deeply understand the problem and solution". But it's unclear what exactly that would have bought me. If I run into further issues I will just solve them at that time.

So what is the issue exactly? This pattern just seems like a looser form of using a library versus building from scratch.

Wow, quite surprising results. I have been working on a personal project with the astral stack (uv, ruff, ty) that's using extremely strict lint/type checking settings, you could call it an experiment in setting up a python codebase to work well with AI. I was not aware that ty's gaps were significant. I just tried with zuban + pyright. Both catch a half dozen issues that ty is ignoring. Zuban has one FP and one FN, pyright is 100% correct.

Looks like I will be converting to pyright. No disrespect to the astral team, I think they have been pretty careful to note that ty is still in early days. I'm sure I will return to it at some point - uv and ruff are excellent.

Thinking in terms of a "speed up multiplier" undersells it completely. The speed up on a task I would have never even attempted is infinite. For my +3000 PR recently on my polymarket engine control plane, I had no idea how these types of things are typically done. It would have taken me many hours to think through an implementation and hours of research online to assemble an understanding on typical best practices. Now with AI I can dispatch many parallel agents to examine virtually all all public resources for this at once.

Basically if it's been done before in a public facing way, you get a passable version of that functionality "for free". That's a huge deal.

Fair, that's optimistic, and it depends what you're doing. Looking at a personal project I had a PR from this week at +3000 -500 that I feel quite good about, took about 2 nights of about an hour each session to shape it into what I needed (a control plane for a polymarket trading engine). Though if I'm being fair, this was an outlier, only possible because I very carefully built the core of the engine to support this in advance - most of the 3K LoC was "boilerplate" in the sense I'm just manipulating existing data structures and not building entirely new abstractions. There are definitely some very hard-fought +175 -25 changes in this repo as well.

Definitely for my day job it's more like a few hundred LoC per task, and they take longer. That said, at work there are structural factors preventing larger changes, code review, needing to get design/product/coworker input for sweeping additions, etc. I fully believe it would be possible to go faster and maintain quality.

Don't know what to tell you. Sounds like you're holding it wrong. Based on the current state of things I would try to get better at holding it the right way.