How to design your AI Agents for success — A lesson from AI coding Agents
· Originally published on Medium
AI Assisted Software Development
Measure user confidence by balancing the value users get against the psychological barriers they face
Confidence in AI Results = Value of success ÷ ( Perceived consequence of error × effort to correct )
When Confidence in AI Results (CAIR) is high, users embrace AI features enthusiastically. When CAIR is low, adoption stalls no matter how technically impressive your AI is.
Why Cursor conquered coding?
Risk: Low — Code is generated locally in a safe environment, never touching production systems
Correction: Low — You simply reject the suggestion and write it yourself
Value: High — Hours of saved coding time and mental effort
CAIR = High ÷ (Low × Low)
= Very High
However, if the system lacked easy rollbacks, both Risk and Correction would become High
e.g. end-to-end AI legacy code migration solution:
if the migration works — great
If not — debugging which component is causing the issue, migrating the component manually while figuring out how to integrate it with the code migrated by AI — increases the cognitive workload and complexity so much that the migration was better without AI
CAIR AI Legacy
Code Migration = High ÷ (High × High)
= Low
This is one of the key reasons startups like second(.)dev could not compete against cursor
That’s also why, despite insane initial hype, Cognition Devin and Magic are yet to ship a better cursor / claude code alternative
They list the Limitations of Autonomous Agents as follows:
- Limited debugging skills
- Poor fine-grained visual reasoning
- Knowledge Cutoffs
To avoid the ensuing frustration caused by the agents failure and increase the CAIR for yourself, be willing to cut your losses earlier
If you ever find yourself thinking “it’s ignoring my instructions” or “this thing is going in circles”, you should be ok discontinuing that conversation or manually taking over.
Problems as such and the inability of AI to take ownership and be held responsible are the only things leading to more opportunities for talented individuals
The moment where AI companies are willing to sign Service Level Agreements for their AI Agents, things would change dramatically!