Quite honestly after using Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex extensively for months, I very rarely hand edit code.

The rabbit hole problem is pretty rare. Usually it happens when the model flips into "stupid mode", some kind of context poisoning. If you are experienced, you know to purge the context when that happens.

In personal projects I avoid manual editing as a form of deliberate practice. At work, I only edit when it is a very small edit. I can usually explain what I want more concisely and quickly than hand editing code.

I probably would use more hand editing if I had classic refactoring tools in the IDEs similar to intellij/pycharm. Though cli based tools were a pleasant surprise once I actively started using them.