The human still has to manage complexity. A properly modularized and maintainable code base is much easier for the LLM to operate on — but the LLM has difficulty keeping the code base in that state without strong guidance.

Putting “Make minimal changes” in my standard prompt helped a lot with the tendency of basically all agents to make too many changes at once. With that addition it became possible to direct the LLM to make something similar to the logical progression of commits I would have made anyway, but now don’t have to work as hard at crafting.

Most of the hype merchants avoid the topic of maintainability because they’re playing to non-technical management skeptical of the importance of engineering fundamentals. But everything I’ve experienced so far working with LLMs screams that the fundamentals are more important than ever.

It usually works well for me. With very big tasks I break the plan into multiple MD files with the relevant context included and work through in individual sessions, updating remaining plans appropriately at the end of each one (usually there will be decision changes or additions during iteration).

It takes a lot of plan to use up the context and most of the time the agent doesn't need the whole plan, they just need what's relevant to the current task.