Great walkthrough, I might send your comment to my coworkers. I use AI to write pretty much 100% of my code and my process looks similar. For writing code, you really want to step through each edit one by one and course-correct it as you go. A lot of times it's obvious when it's taking a suboptimal approach and it's much easier to correct before the wrong thing is written. Plus it's easier to control this way than trying to overengineer rules files to get it to do exactly what you want. The "I'm running 10 autonomous agents at once" stuff is a complete joke unless you are a solo dev just trying to crap something working out.

I use Sonnet 4.5 exclusively for this right now. Codex is great if you have some kind of high-context tricky logic to think through. If Sonnet 4.5 gets stuck I like to have it write a prompt for Codex. But Codex is not a good daily driver.