The bit about bigger handoffs weakening your understanding is the same thing I've run into with review gates on agent output. Making myself write out what a change should touch before accepting the diff ends up doing the same job as the write-run-observe loop, just moved earlier -- it's still work, but it catches the "looks convincing but I don't actually understand it" failure mode before it compounds across handoffs. Doesn't get back the moment-to-moment feedback though, that part I think is just gone with this workflow.