Not asking for answers to these questions, just frustration dumping:

The biggest things I've struggled with are models having taste. For spec writing I was having a lot of issues with them making statements that were interpretable in a superposition of ways, eg "we'll do XYZ with entities that support and need it" when there's 3 possible entities and the model hand-waved at exactly the wrong tokens.

I added AGENTS.md guidance + memories to be unambiguous (with short but good examples) and "no coined shorthand". Now I'm getting a marked increase in specificity, but it's places that don't matter (claude explaining existing code to itself). I'm having difficulty controlling the spew of new text, but feature writing/research still gets fuzzy and lazy around the difficult underspecified aspects of the problem/feature.

Do I just keep dumping examples into reviewer subagent context and have them rewrite and simplify the research subagent spew?

I repeatedly have "Risks and gotchas" sections have a whole paragraph dedicated to things that don't matter, and then a single sentence bullet point that's actually a huge problem when I dig into it.

Do I have a generic hook to make subagents to review bullet points and size them commensurate with impact? If I tell them to "have taste", do they have taste?

I'm just trying to get good code done. I hate these things.