> it happens when they give Claude too much autonomy. It works better when you tell it what to do, rather than letting it decide. That can be at a pretty high level, though. Basically reduce the problem to a set of well-established subproblems that it’s familiar with. Same as you’d do with a junior developer, really.

Equating "junior developers" and "coding LLMs" is pretty lame. You handhold a junior developers so, eventually, you don't have to handhold anymore. The junior developer is expected to learn enough, and be trusted enough, to operate more autonomously. "Junior developers" don't exist solely to do your bidding. It may be valuable to recognize similarities between a first junior developer interaction and a first LLM interaction, but when every LLM interaction requires it to be handheld, the value of the iterative nature of having a junior developer work along side you is not at all equivalent.

I didn’t say they are equivalent, nor do I in any way consider them equivalent. One is a tool, the other is a person.

I simply said the description of the problem should be broken down similar to the way you’d do it for a junior developer. As opposed to the way you’d express the problem to a more senior developer who can be trusted to figure out the right way to do it at a higher level.