Not asking for feedback is the killer for me. Even most junior developers will ask for more information if they don't have enough context/confidence to complete a task.
I often ask Claude to scan through the code first and then come back with questions related to the task. It sometimes comes back with useful questions, but most of the time it acts like a university student looking for participation marks from a tutorial; choosing questions to signal understanding rather than be helpful.
I have taken to appending "DO NOT START WRITING CODE." to almost every prompt.. I try to get it to analyze and ask questions and summarize what its going to do first, and even then it will sometimes ignore that and jump into writing (the wrong) code. A big part of the wrangling seems to be getting it to analyze or reason before charging down a wrong path.
GitHub just released spec-kit which I think attempts to get the human more involved in the spec/planning/task building process. You basically instruct the LLM to generate these docs and you tweak them to flesh it out all fix mistakes. Then you tell the LLM to work on a single task at a time, reviewing in small chunks.
That's how everyone is already using Claude Code, it's not GitHub's idea. You go into plan mode, get it to iterate on the idea, then ask it to make (and save) a to do list md. Then you get it to run through the to-do list, checking tasks off as it goes.
