The other side of catcing going off the rails is when it wants to make edits without it reading the context I know would’ve been neccessary for a high quality change.

yeah exactly - it's that confidence without understanding. like it'll make a change that looks reasonable in isolation but breaks an assumption that's only documented three files over, or relies on state that's set up elsewhere. and you can't always tell just from looking at the diff whether it actually understood the full picture or just got lucky. this is why seeing what files it's reading before it makes changes would be super helpful - at least you'd know if it missed something obvious