1. I'm working in Rust, so it's a very safe and low-defect language. I suspect that has a tremendous amount to do with my successes. "nulls" (Option<T>) and "errors" (Result<T,E>) must be handled, and the AST encodes a tremendous amount about the state, flow, and how to deal with things. I do not feel as comfortable with Claude Code's TypeScript and React outputs - they do work, but it can be much more imprecise. And I only trust it with greenfield Python, editing existing Python code has been sloppy. The Rust experience is downright magical.

2. I architecturally describe every change I want made. I don't leave it up to the LLM to guess. My prompts might be overkill, but they result in 70-80ish% correctness in one shot. (I haven't measured this, and I'm actually curious.) I'll paste in file paths, method names, struct definitions and ask Claude for concrete changes. I'll expand "plumb foo field through the query and API layers" into as much detail as necessary. My prompts can be several paragraphs in length.

3. I don't attempt an entire change set or PR with a single prompt. I work iteratively as I would naturally work, just at a higher level and with greater and broader scope. You get a sense of what granularity and scope Claude can be effective at after a while.

You can't one shot stuff. You have to work iteratively. A single PR might be multiple round trips of incremental change. It's like being a "film director" or "pair programmer" writing code. I have exacting specifications and directions.

The power is in how fast these changes can be made and how closely they map to your expectations. And also in how little it drains your energy and focus.

This also gives me a chance to code review at every change, which means by the time I review the final PR, I've read the change set multiple times.