I am the type of engineer who prefers simplicity and I have not found a way to make AI increase the simplicity of code I'm working on. If left to its own devices, Claude absolutely loves adding more member variables, wrapper functions, type conversions, rather than, say, analyzing and eliminating redundancies. So my experience is that AI is more closely aligned with the engineer type for whom the solution is always "add more code", rather than whatever its human manager would do.

I'm extremely cautious about complexity, yet have adopted a claude-based dev flow. It comes down to watching and guiding it, and not letting it run autonomously. At a certain point your codebase will tip over into the patterns you've defined and claude will recognize and follow them. Just treat Claude as a vim editor mode and you will see a big difference, and your relationship to the tool will change.

The only solution that I've found to work, somewhat, is to plan with it to design the APIs exactly how you want it, atleast the public facing ones. It still does all kinds of mess in the functions but those are easier to cleanup on the next iteration cycle. If you let it design everything, it'll definitely go overboard.

I agree, it just sucks at understanding style and simplicity.

It's good at code generation, feature wise, it can scaffold and cobble together shit, but when it comes down to code structure, architecture, you essentially have to argue with it over what is better, and it just doesn't seem to get it, at which point it's better to just take the reins and do it yourself. If there's any code smells in your code already, it will just repeat them. Sometimes it will just output shit that's overtly confusing for no reason.