[or_am_i]

Yeah, I guess I'm silently assuming the developer's time is more valuable than the API costs (which is true in the majority of use cases in US+EU, unless using parallel/multi-shot strategies or hyper-expensive frontier models).

I agree, it can feel a lot like a slot machine at times, and it's a failure mode somewhat unique to developing with LLM, where it doesn't just fail outright or tell you "I don't know how to do that", but instead you find yourself in the end of a sometimes hours long spiral of trying just-one-more-prompt.

It's important to experience this mode of failure and learn to notice the "spiral" early and adjust the approach. Sometimes it's enough to switch to a different model, often an explicit planning step helps. But more likely than not, a "spiral" means approaching the frontier of LLM possibility. In my experience, certain types of changes are really hard for current gen LLM to pull off, like large scale refactorings changing the project architecture, or implementing genuinely novel algorithmic ideas, so we still need a human touch for these (yay?)