> I’ll tell the LLM my main goal (which will be a very specific feature or bugfix e.g. “I want to add retries with exponential backoff to Stavrobot so that it can retry if the LLM provider is down”), and talk to it until I’m sure it understands what I want. This step takes the most time, sometimes even up to half an hour of back-and-forth until we finalize all the goals, limitations, and tradeoffs of the approach, and agree on what the end architecture should look like.

This sounds sensible, but also makes me wonder how much time is actually being saved if implementing a "very specific feature or bugfix" still takes an hour of back and forth with an LLM.

Can't help but think that this is still just an awkward intermediate phase of development with adolescent LLMs where we need to think about implementation choices at all.