My experiments using a more hands off approach of prompting claude code have always resulted in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back play, where the agent clearly did some good stuff, but did some other stuff in a somewhat undesirable manner, which subsequently needed correcting.

This usually results in A: creating commits where tons of code is being constantly added and removed, B: due to Claude's somewhat cavalier attitude to existing code, has steadily eroded my familiarity with the code base.

I'm still not convinced that these longer loops are that beneficial, compared to 1min prompts to 5-10min AI work.