I would be very interested to get a more detailed scope of what you did here. Feeding thousands of lines of code into GPT4 and getting a near perfect refactor does very much NOT sound like my experience, but it seems highly desirable.
But coding with gpt or co-pilot is too disrupted for me.
This is interesting; I do a third thing that's the exact opposite of both of you.
I generally know the architecture I want, so I just slowly spoon-feed it to GPT-4 and have it build each of the components with the right interfaces to fit together. Usually, building each component requires a few rounds of hand-holding it through various refactoring. Its first draft of code tends to be, for lack of a better description, totally lacking in any creativity or elegance --- generally bland, insipid, and mundane stuff.
But it'll gladly take refactoring directions to get it into shape, so it's still very quick to get a whole bunch of components written up. Then I just glue everything together on my own. And the whole experience is still way better than writing a bunch of boring boilerplate code by hand.
I'm not sure what you are feeding it. My scope is closer to a file at a time of fairly mostly self-contained python or C and asking it to clean it up or convert it to typescript.
I can imagine lots of scenarios it doesn't work well.
In mine, it does, and I have plenty of transcripts showing that :)