> I spend a ton of time planning out & specing the problem with claude, to be as specific as possible and be as constrained as possible so it cannot go on side-quests

I still have yet to see this be efficient. The time I spent doing this is way less efficient than simply giving the LLM some high level direction and putting that time towards reading the code it generates and correcting small piece by piece (occasionally doing things manually, but that’s only for more off the rails stuff).

It’s about the same amount of time as up front planning, except I know the code much better as well as end up with less mistakes compared to having it implement a front loaded plan.

Knowing the codebase makes everything else 10x more efficient too - triaging bug reports, planning other work, knowing what work needs done (this is a big one), reviewing PRs, etc.