> My personal headcanon: this tooling works well when built on simple patterns, and can handle complex work. This tooling has also been not great at coming up with new patterns, and if left unsupervised will totally make up new patterns that are going to go south very quickly. With that lens, I find myself just rewriting what Claude gives me in a good number of cases.

I've been doing a greenfield project with Claude recently. The initial prototype worked but was very ugly (repeated duplicate boilerplate code, a few methods doing the same exact thing, poor isolation between classes)... I was very much tempted to rewrite it on my own. This time, I decided to try and get it to refactor so get the target architecture and fix those code quality issues, it's possible but it's very much like pulling teeths... I use plan mode, we have multiple round of reviews on a plan (that started based on me explaining what I expect), then it implements 95% of it but doesn't realize that some parts of it were not implemented... It reminds me of my experience mentoring a junior employee except that claude code is both more eager (jumping into implementation before understanding the problem), much faster at doing things and dumber.

That said, I've seen codebases created by humans that were as bad or worse than what claude produced when doing prototype.