> This is magical because you are both on the exact right path and not right. My theory is there’s a sort of skill to teasing code from AI (or maybe not and it’s alchemy all over again) and this is all new enough and we don’t have a common vocabulary for it that it’s hard for one person who is having a good experience and one person who is not to meaningfully sort out what they are doing differently.
I don't think this is a hypothesis.
Outside of asking for one-shot tasks that have been done a million times before, LLMs do not "default" to good work.
If you ask them over-and-over again to find holes in their solution, to fix them, to evaluate for tech debt, to test all cases, to re-asses after the cases if it's architecturally coherent, to compare to the closest available known good implementations, etc etc, they can eventually get what you want done unbelievably cheaply to an acceptable level of quality.
I mentioned initially - their work is unbelievably cheap, you should be EAGER to reject it. Most people wouldn't even bend down to pick a penny up off the sidewalk. They can literally pump out CLs for a penny. You shouldn't even waste time looking at "I'm done" until they've gone through 10+ rounds of reviews, refactors, bug fixes, thought of more test cases, compared to known implementations, etc.
Why are you going to spend ~$50-$100+ of your time reviewing $0.01 of LLM time?! It makes no sense!
If you just listen to them say "I'm done" and move on to their next task, it won't take too many days before you're swimming in a sea of incoherent garbage.