unlike the op, I've been having a wonderful time using claude, both at work and for my own personal projects, so I will share what has worked for me, just in case it resonates with anyone else.

my anecdotal advice is to avoid the entire "agent" temptation, and treat the LLM as a code generator. have a single session running at a time. come up with a plan, iterate on it until you are satisfied, then tell it to execute the plan, and watch it. not necessarily to the extent of reading the scroll (though I sometimes do do that too!) but as it finishes each step look over what it has done, suggest improvements and course corrections, and then let it go on to the next step. at the end you will have a pretty good grasp of the state of the code, and the overall time it will take you isn't really any longer than trying to churn out reams of code and then go through it all at once.

the other option if you want something closer to a one shot workflow is to go into far more detail during the planning stage, have it describe not just architectural details but actual code (if you're a senior engineer especially you probably know what the key pieces of code that will drive a lot of other decisions mechanically are likely to be).

also refactoring is cheaper than it has ever been, if something feels hard to grasp to you stop and work with the LLM until you like the looks of it better.

and again, the key bit is to have one LLM doing one thing at a time, and to stay engaged in the process while it does so.

Unfortunately the incremental approach doesn't help when it comes to the review step by another user, they've still gotta take it as a lump and apply fresh eyes on it.

I agree I think Vibe coding (even with myraid loops) is more burnouty than using it like an assistant and being closer to the output.

Agree with this. I have learned to interact with Claude the same way. Detailed hashing it out at the beginning, then finally execute, even maybe with your scaffolding at the beginning to guide the process. I tried writing this process down in a 'zen of Claude' as a reminder https://github.com/ctomkow/claude/blob/main/README.md I've started being able refactor legacy code into a new architecture with great success. Work I've been putting off due to the grind of the work.

Edit: I will say it's taken me some months of working with Claude to get to this working process. If you let claude operate with free reign, the inevitable mess and struggle it runs into burns and stresses you out. Also, keeping up with some manual coding when you feel like it and punting to Claude when you have had enough manual coding ensures you still feel in control of the codebase.