> My team has a sandbox where we create, deploy, and run AI-generated code without a human in the loop.

I think if you keep the human in the loop this would go much better.

I've been having a lot of success recently by combining recursive invocation with an "AskHuman" tool that takes a required tuple of (question itself, how question unblocks progress). Allowing unstructured assistant dialog with the user/context is a train wreck by comparison. I've found that chain-of-thought (i.e., a "Think" tool that barfs into the same context window) seems to be directly opposed to the idea of recursively descending through the problem. Recursion is a much more powerful form of CoT.