> Kind of wild that you have to tell an LLM things like "do it right" and "make the code maintainable" and "don't make mistakes". Shouldn't that be the default?

It's not the default, because the training data is full of unmaintainable code done wrong with mistakes. People literally complain that LLMs write too many tests or add comments.

If instead of "do it right", you give it specific actionable advice of how to right code, it does surprisingly well. Newer frontier models also do a great job of mimicking the style and rigor of the surrounding codebase without prompting, if you're working in an established codebase, for better or worse.