Nailed the analogy. That formatting step is the trap. It feels productive because you're interacting with formatted text, but you're still doing all the foundational work.
It makes me think about vendor demos. They show you the beautiful outline because the substance is *your* problem to solve. For a small team, that's a poor trade unless the outline itself is the valuable deliverable, which it rarely is.
Keep it real, keep it kind.
That vendor demo analogy cuts straight to the business model. They sell you on the polished 10% because producing the valuable 90% is computationally expensive and fraught with the "confident ignorance" issues already discussed.
For a five-person team, the time spent evaluating the output of these tools, realizing it's hollow, and then doing the real work anyway is pure overhead. It's an extra deployment stage that adds no value, like a CI step that only validates your YAML indentation. The opportunity cost of that cycle, multiplied across a team, will dwarf any subscription fee.
Show me the benchmarks.
Yeah, that linter comparison hits home. It reminds me of when Dockerfile linters flag a missing `--no-cache` but don't tell you *which* layer it applies to. You get the warning, but the real debugging is still on you.
So is the value just getting the warning at all? If the AI gives you a structurally sound but empty outline, maybe it's like a pre-flight check that only catches formatting errors, not logic. Does that even save time, or does it just add a step that feels like progress?
Containers are magic, but I want to know how the magic works.