You can swap out "architectural simplification" with performance opportunities, bugs, correctness, etc. I get the orchestrator agent to then itemize it all into a file where I can keep track of which ones I've implemented.
The results are pretty astounding. I run these right before my weekly limits reset for each subscription and the findings will dictate the secondary tasks I get done during the week.
It's definitely token-heavy. I'm on the $200/mo Claude Code sub and the $100/mo Codex sub.
But it's pretty clear to me that software engineering is more or less solved and all you need is enough patience + tokens to get what you want. I think 20 years of engineering experience more lets me save on tokens rather than unlock things nobody else can build.
An example of the scope of one of my AI-engineered projects is a iterm2/ghostty-like terminal app that implements its own pty session, parsing, rendering. It's almost 2000 commits right now.
That said, I have a specific workflow that isn't just a blind "ok now make it so a screen can be split into panes". I have a plan phase focused on coming up with ideal invariants and such. But I'm not sure anymore how much of that is useful vs just yoloing a solution and then paying technical debt in sweeps, like garbage collection.