Thanks for the concrete examples! These seem to be more sophisticated than the cases I use them for. Mostly I'm using them for tedious, simpler routine code (needing to process all files in a directory in a certain way, output them in a similar tree structure, with changes to filenames, logging, etc).
Your Django ORM may be more complicated than the ones I use. I haven't tried it much with Django (still reluctant to use it with production code), but a coworker did use it on our code base and it found good optimizations for some of our inefficient ORM usage. He learned new Django features as a result (new to him, that is).
> I tried to prompt it with a chat style discussion, but it often did bigger edits I would have liked, and failed to share a high-level plan in advance, something I often requested.
With Aider, I often use /ask to do a pure chat (no agents). It gives me a big picture overview and the code changes. If I like it, I simply say "Go ahead". Or I refine with corrections, and when it gets it right, I say "Go ahead". So far it rarely has changed code beyond what I want, and the few times it did turned out to be a good idea.
Also, with Aider, you can limit the context to a fixed set of files. That doesn't solve it changing other things in the file - but as I said, rarely a problem for me.
One thing to keep in mind - it's better to view the LLM not as an extension of yourself, but more like a coworker who is making changes that you're reviewing. If you have a certain vision/design in mind, don't expect it to follow it all the way to low level details - just as a coworker will sometimes deviate.
> My biggest frustrations were not coding problems per se, but just general inability to follow instructions and see implications, and lacking the awareness to step back and ask for confirmations or better directions if there are "hold on, somethings not right" kind of moments.
You have to explicitly tell it to ask questions (and some models ask great questions - not sure about Sonnet 3.7). Read this page:
https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/
I don't follow much of what's on his post, but the first part where you specify what you want it to do and have it ask you questions has always been useful! He's talking about big changes, but I sometimes have it ask me for minor changes. I just add to my prompts "Ask me something if it seems ambiguous".