If you let it paint you into a corner, why are you doing so?

I don't know what you mean by "a lot of guidance". Maybe I just naturally do that, but to me there's not been much change in the level of guidance I need to give Claude Code or my own agent vs. what I'd give developers working for me.

Another issue is that as long as you ensure it builds good enough tests, the cost of telling it to just throw out the code it builds later and redo it with additional architectural guidance keeps dropping.

The code is increasingly becoming throwaway.