The solution is to codify these sorts of things in prompts and tool use and gateways like linters etc. you have to let go…

What do you mean "you have to let go".

I use some ai tools and sometimes they're fine, but I won't in my lifetime anyway hand over everything to an AI, not out of some fear or anything, but even purely as a hobby. I like creating things from scratch, I like working out problems, why would I need to let that go?

Well, the point is, if it's not a hobby, you have to encode your preferences in lint and formatters, rather than holding onto manually messing with the output.

It's really freeing to say "Well, if the linter and the formatter don't catch it, it doesn't matter". I always update lint settings (writing new rules if needed) based on nit PR feedback, so the codebase becomes easier to review over time.

It's the same principle as any other kind of development - let the machine do what the machine does well.

I have been doing this, and it does sort of work, but the problem is that for things that can't easily be turned into deterministic lints, prompting isn't 100% reliable. Every bit you go against the LLM's training data, it's more likely to forget to do it.