[youoy]

It completely depends on the way you prompt the model. Nothing prevents you from telling it exactly what you want, to the level of specifying the files and lines to focus on. In my experience anything other than that is a recepy for failure in sufficiently complex projects.

[layer8]

Several comments can be made here: (1) You only control what the LMM generates to the extent that you specify precisely what it should generate. You cannot reasons about what it will generate for what you don't specify. (2) Even for what you specify precisely, you don't actually have full control, because the LLM is not reliable in a way you can reason about. (3) The more you (have to) specify precisely what it should generate, the less benefit using the LLM has. After all, regular coding is just specifying everything precisely.

The upshot is, you have to review everything the LLM generates, because you can't predict the qualities or failures of its output. (You cannot reason in advance about what qualities and failures it definitely will or will not exhibit.) This is different from, say, using a compiler, whose output you generally don't have to review, and whose input-to-output relation you can reason about with precision.

Note: I'm not saying that using an LLM for coding is not workable. I'm saying that it lacks what people generally like about regular coding, namely the ability to reason with absolute precision about the relation between the input and the behavior of the output.