You do learn how to control claude code and architect/orient things around getting it to deliver what you want. That's a skill that is both new and possibly going to be part of how we work for a long time (but also overlaps with the work tech leads and managers do).

My proto+sqlite+mesh project recently hit the point where it's too big for Claude to maintain a consistent "mental model" of how eg search and the db schemas are supposed to be structured, kept taking hacky workarounds by going directly to a db at the storage layer instead of the API layer, etc. so I hit an insane amount of churn trying to get it to implement some of the features needed to get it production ready.

Here's the whackamole/insanity documented in git commit history: https://github.com/accretional/collector/compare/main...feat...

But now I know some new tricks and intuition for avoiding this situation going forward. Because I do understand the mental model behind what this is supposed to look like at its core, and I need to maintain some kind of human-friendly guard rails, I'm adding integration tests in a different repo and a README/project "constitution" that claude can't change but is accountable for maintaining, and configuring it to keep them in context while working on my project.

Kind of a microcosm of startups' reluctance to institute employee handbook/kpis/PRDs followed by resignation that they might truly be useful coordination tools.