To be fair, you're not supposed to be doing the "one shot" thing with LLMs in a mature codebase.

You have to supply it the right context with a well formed prompt, get a plan, then execute and do some cleanup.

LLMs are only as good as the engineers using them, you need to master the tool first before you can be productive with it.

I’m well aware, as I said I am regularly using CC/Codex/OC in a variety of projects, and I certainly didn’t claim that can’t be used productively in a large code base.

But that different challenges become apparent that aren’t addressed by examples like this article which tend to focus on narrow, greenfield applications that can be readily rebuilt in one shot.

I already get plenty of value in small side projects that Claude can create in minutes. And while extremely cool, these examples aren’t the kind of “step change” improvement I’d like to see in the area where agentic tools are currently weakest in my daily usage.