In my experience the models perform substantially worse if asked to create small PRs or commits. They lack the ability to sequence work and understand dependencies efficiently enough to manage it – it's not that they can't do small PRs, it's that doing them takes vastly more resources which then hits context limits etc. And if you want to then go back and edit a stack of commits or PRs, rebasing work into the middle,…
I mean, sometimes I don’t know how I want to write something until I’m finished. Huge refactors are often like this. So, just like you said, rewrite the whole thing, THEN break it apart into bite size chunks that tell the story and feed it to others with acceptable and reasonable context. It’s a skill that engineers need, and it pays dividends to all on the team, including you, when your coworkers ALSO start doing th…
And this is often how I proceed when working with an LLM as well. We build the whole thing, and if I think it needs to be split apart, then in another session I work with the LLM to break it apart into reasonable chunks.