While I agree with you I usually find the best output when doing the contrary of this:

> Claude gives me a sculpture in a good rough starting shape, but it usually needs to be sculpted down at the end whether manually

I make the sculpture in a good starting shape manually by writing the code that matters, data shaping, interfaces etc. It's then way more effective filling the rest following the path I created. Way better than any spec driven, as code is the ultimate spec.

The other way around makes it harder for me to fix, cause even with a lot of steering it makes things in a way i'd never introducing a bias that requires a high discipline and energy to fight back