>I don't understand how to get even bad results. Or any results at all. I'm at a level where I'm going "This can't just be me not having read the manual".

>I get the same change applied multiple times, the agent having some absurd method of applying changes that conflict with what I say it like some git merge from hell and so on. I can't get it to understand even the simplest of contexts etc.

That is weird. results have a ton of variation, but not that much.

Say you get a claude subscription, point it to a relatively self contained file in your project, hand it the command to run relevant tests, and tell it to find quick win refactoring opportunities, making sure that the business outcome of the tests is maintained even if mocks need to change.

You should get relevant suggestions for refactoring, you should be able to have the changes applied reasonably, you should have the tests passing after some iterations of running and fixing by itself. At most you might need to check that it doesn't cheat by getting a false positive in a test or something similar.

Is such an exercise not working for you? I'm genuinely curious.