alt Hacker NewsWith the current generation of model, it really isn't necessary to restart every time you don't like something. Certainly this depends on the model. Most of my recent experience is with Claude Sonnet/Opus and Gpt-5.x.
I very often, when reviewing code, think of better abstractions or enhancements and just continue asking for refactors inline. Very very rarely does the model fall off the rails.
I suppose if your unit of work was very large you might have more issues perhaps? Generally though, large units of work have other issues as well.
Yes I too have found newer models (mostly Opus) to be much better at iterative development. With that being said if I have very strong architectural/developmental steer on what I believe the output should be [mostly for production code where I thoroughly review absolute everything] it’s better to have a documented spec with everything covered rather than trying to clean up via an agent conversation. In the team I’m in we keep all plan.mds for a feature, previously before AI tooling we created/revised these plans in Confluence, so to some degree reworking the plan is more an artefact of the previous process and not necessarily a best practice I don’t think.