This is my experience with using LLMs for complex tasks: If you're lucky they'll figure it out from a simple description, but to get most things done the way you expect requires a lot of explicit direction, test creation, iteration, and tokens.

One of the keys to being productive with LLMs is learning how to recognize when it's going to take much more effort to babysit the LLM into getting the right result as opposed to simply doing the work yourself.

Re: tokens, there is a point where you have to decide what's worth it to you. I'd been unimpressed with what I could get out of chat apps but when I wanted to do a rails app that would cost me thousands in developer time and some weeks between communication zoom meetings and iteration... I bit the bullet and kept topping up Claude API and spent about $500 on Opus over the course of a weekend, but the site is done and works great.

It would not be the first time that an IT services provider makes more money the worse their products perform.