An Anthropic study on agentic coding sessions found that experienced users completed working, verified solutions at twice the rate of novices: 28-33% versus 15%.
The gap comes from how they prompt. Experts issued 12 actions per session and wrote around 3,200 words. Novices only issued 5 actions and wrote around 600. More prompts and longer ones mean more precise specifications and more course corrections along the way. Producing more output by itself is not the win. Directing the agent with better detail is.
The deciding factor is domain knowledge, not coding skill. You need to know what a good result looks like in order to steer toward it.
