> "AI writes overly complex ccode" - only if you let it. A "do not overengineer it" or "Pareto, 80% result with 20% of effort" go a long long way.

No doubt code quality increased substantially, but I've been wrestling overengineering for a long time, with both GPT/Claude - they will take any small chance to write excess code/documentation/specifications, anything - they seem to love reinventing the wheel. Heck, even prompts sent to subagents are walls of text.

Explicitly requiring simple solutions works for simple problems, but for more complex ones, complexity quickly creeps in. I even ask the alternative model to challenge the complexity of solution, but doesn't work really well.

There is a perverse incentive for AI companies to train models to be verbose, as it increases the tokens consumption.

I've found several solutions to avoid agents from building complexity -- the first is to not use Astra or Fable/Mythos unless absolutely required. The second is to use effort level "high", not "xhigh". The last idea would be to edit your AGENTS.md to be short, and start it with something like:

Contributors to this project must follow YAGNI, DRY, KISS, and principle of least astonishment, both from user-visible surfaces, and backend design.

Code is a liability. Do not build anything not expressly asked for.