Man, I must really suck at this stuff. This is not at all my experience. Asking LLMs to refactor almost always results in hasty abstractions that I want to keep out of my codebases at all cost. Am I not letting go enough?
Maybe I'm just bad at getting it to do things, but I think your question about "letting go" is the real story. I think there are a lot of people not paying close enough attention to what's coming out of the LLM, and the tech debt building up is going to come back to bite them when it builds to a point the LLM can no longer make progress and they have to untangle the mess.
I ask the LLM "Can you find anything in this file(s) that can be made shorter or more logical?"
And then as I said, I like less than 10% of the ideas the LLM comes up with. But it is so fast to read through 10 ideas (A minute or so) that it is well worth it.
Sonnet 3.7 with thinking is my go-to.
Deepseek R1
Gemini 2.5 pro (I've heard it said Gemini is outperforming Sonnet, but I find Sonnet more consistent)
O1-mini
Depending on what I'm doing it's generally either via Cody or Aider.