My experience has been quite different. I often give it a large block of instructions and let it run autonomously for a while. When I come back it often did what I expected. It doesn't have good taste with respect to APIs, though, so sometimes I need a heavier hand on that.

I find it helps to have a CLAUDE.md file with instructions and thorough documentation. This is on a ~30k LOC Python codebase with type-checking and tests. YMMV with other languages.