I'm with you. I've had a mostly empty email for at least a decade (< 10 items, with each of them representing an action I'll need to take) and can't imagine doing it differently. I'm one of those empty desk/empty mind people, I guess.
1) I throw it the simpler tasks that I know only involve a few files and there are similar examples it can work from (and I tend to provide the files I'm expecting will be changed as context). Like, "Ok, I just created a new feature, go ahead and setup all test files for me with all the standard boilerplate. Then I review, make adjustments myself (or re-roll if I forgot to specify something important), then commit and move forward.
2) I use the frontier thinking models for planning help. Like when I'm sketching out a feature and I think I know what will need to be changed, but giving, say, an Opus 4.5 agent a chance to take in the changes I want, perform searches, and then write up its own plan has been helpful in making sure I'm not missing things. Then I work from those tasks.
I agree that Copilot's Cloud agents aren't useful (they don't use smart models, presumably because it's $$$) and also I'm not a great multitasker so having background agents on worktrees would confuse the heck out of me.
Auto-assign bug tickets to AI agents which work to fix the bugs, get AI code reviewed, make adjustments, send to human for sanity checking, deploy via CI.
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