Maybe it's just because Anthropic is so many more miles ahead than OpenAI, but I have not had the "it doesn't work" experience that people are talking about here. I've set up agentic pipelines with code architecture guidelines, the orchestrator calls the implementer, tester, reviewer when needed. If the developed code isn't up to standard or the work item isn't fully captured, it'll reject it and send it back to implementation. It invokes the architect if it runs into something unanticipated. The pipeline can run a feature with high accuracy and very little input.
I've even used it to run batteries of frozen experiments on self synthesized data using its own simulation harnesses to discover novel techniques that work in the real world. If it isn't helpful, I feel like you are doing it wrong.