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A lot of people should try being more specific in their prompts, but then again at a certain point you're basically just writing all the code in sentence form!

I could do this in the beginning of 2025. Unfortunately, given the over-proactiveness of model these days, I find that they end up inferring what my original request was and implementing it anyway, and then writing unit tests, etc. even when all I asked for was to wire up a few components, as an example.

I actually find the converse, that I try to scope things down into chunks small enough for the model to work on, but it will start trying to hack off pieces that don't belong because it thinks the restricted scope is the whole world and I have to stop it and explain the bigger picture so it stops trying to remove things that serve the full scope.

For me, at least, the overall design needs to come from using the code.

I think for refactoring, you're definitely right as if you give them a good high level sketch you can get them to do all of the more tedious implementation.