I have very few issues with Claude. If I just tell it what the goal is, it will make some sensible suggestions, and I can tell it to start coding towards it. It rarely messes up, and when it does I catch it in the act.

You don't necessarily want to completely tune out while you're using the AI. You want to know what it's up to, but you don't need to be at your highest level of attention to do it. This is what makes it satisfying for me, because often it eats up several minutes to hunt down trivial bugs. Normally when you have some small thing like that, you have to really concentrate to find it, and it's frustrating.

When the AI is on a multi-file edit that you understand, that's when you can tune out a bit. You know that it is implementing some edit across several instances of the same interface, so you can be confident that in a few minutes everything will build and you will get a notification.

It's as if I can suddenly make all the architecture level edits without paying the cost in time that I had previously.

Yeah, sounds about like babysitting a toddler.

I was going to point out that what you are describing is exactly like what it is to be a leader/director of people working in most efforts, i.e., managing people, when it occurred to me that maybe what we are dealing with in this conflict and mud slinging around AI is the similar conflict of coders not wanting to become managers as they are often even not really good at being managers. Devs work well together at a shared problem solving (and even that often only sometimes), but it strikes me as the same problem as when devs are forced to become managers and they really don't like it, they hate it even, sometimes even leaving their company for that reason.

When you are working with AI, you are effectively working with a group of novice people, largely with basic competence, but lacking many deeper skills that are largely developed from experience. You kind of get what you put into it with proper planning, specificity in requests/tasks, proper organization based on smart structuring of skillsets and specializations, etc.

This may ruffle some feathers, but I feel like even though AI has its issues with coding in particular, this issue is really a leadership question; lead and mentor your AI correctly, adequately, and appropriately and you end up with decent, workable outcomes. GIGO