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More often, LLMs give me wildly complex and over-engineered solutions.

I have had this happen too, but a "this seems complex, do we need that complexity? can you justify it? or can we make this simpler?" or similar has them come back with something much better.

I get good results with: "Can this be improved while maintaining simplicity and concision?"

When I do that, they come back with something more simple than before but either wrong or still unnecessarily complex.

Over the past week, I have been writing a small library for midi controller I/O and simple/elegant is the priority. I am not really that opinionated. I just want it to not be overengineered. AI has been able to make some suggestions when I give it a specific goal for refactoring a specific class, but it cannot solve a problem on its own without overengineered solutions.

You just have to be more specific. Don't just tell it to refactor, tell it how to refactor. I usually start out a bit vague then I add more specific instructions when I want specific changes.

I often just make the changes myself because it's faster than describing them.

You do the thinking, LLM does the writing. The LLM doesn't solve problems, that's your job. The LLMs job is to help you do the job more efficiently. Not just do it for you.

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