"My experience has been the opposite. I prompt it and it generates something that mostly works, but steering it into something that would actually be maintainable is an exercise in futility."

I've seen others have this experience, too.

It would be interesting to sit us down next to each other for a day or two and compare how we do things, but I suspect much less than that won't reveal much of interest.

It is weird to me how often I have to remind the models about their skills or CLAUDE.md (or equivalent). Though I've sort of taken it as just another way I can impact the process, because sometimes I'm happy for them to forget a particular skill for a moment... particularly when I want it to just do a thing based on my prompt and it decides to invoke the "OK let's design this super carefully" skill. I've gotten a lot of use out of that one but I'm pretty comfortable having to explicitly invoke it.