But if your coworker is shipping 5x more PRs than you your manager couldn’t care less about understanding code
There's the "inline editing" paradigm - independent sessions, describe each micro-change individually. This is good for quick responses but requires you to re-describe the context every time. There's also the "use an agent as a fancy code editor" stuff - just list out all the functions and the changes you want to make in them. This is a better workflow IMO but the trap is that it doesn't feel "productive" compared to one-shotting it, irrespective of the actual quality.
So people gravitate towards one-shot agentic prompts without a human in the loop.