In my experience the models perform substantially worse if asked to create small PRs or commits

I mean, sometimes I don’t know how I want to write something until I’m finished. Huge refactors are often like this. So, just like you said, rewrite the whole thing, THEN break it apart into bite size chunks that tell the story and feed it to others with acceptable and reasonable context. It’s a skill that engineers need, and it pays dividends to all on the team, including you, when your coworkers ALSO start doing this back to you and you’re asked to review it.

Agreed. Asking for small PRs or commits can backfire, unless the work is deliberately scoped into smaller pieces from the beginning. This requires a human design review and planning and is one of the reasons I don't outsource that part to an agent.

I've had no trouble getting small PRs. No idea if I'm doing something different than you or the things I asked for just happened to be small. Next time I get a big one I'll consider trying to ask the AI to break it up after it's finished.

I think LLMs are actually great at breaking up work into workstreams and tasks. The issue is that tasks do not equal good PR stacks on their own. You’ll need to use feature slices instead (like do backend part -> PR it, etc). LLMs can do that, but you need to harness them into it.

That's just like humans though. Find me a developer that loves maintaining code and I'll show you 10 that love rewrites or greenfield.

Most professional software developers (probably including you) never do any work that could legitimately be described as engineering . And that's fine because most software isn't very important anyway. There's very little software that requires true engineering practices. The exceptions are in domains like avionics and medical devices.

I can't be happier seeing how many posts are about AI making PR terrorists unhappy. They can no longer bully their teammates so they rant about it here

I have a completely different experience than you, but I have also invested quite a bit of effort into the issue. I will agree that with simple prompting and without reminders, models do not do this sort of thing well or consistently. On the other hand I have two skills that I use regularly `/atomic-commits` and `/split-branch` that do exactly what you're describing. It has been an exercise in taking the time to put to words the concepts you're describing, which has been very interesting because it's forced me to put to words many thoughts on the subject I had never formalized, and you're correct, there's a lot of theory of mind and considering of other people's perspectives that go into it. * Does the series of commits tell a cohesive story of the feature, each commit building on the last one? It's surprisingly easy to have an ordering of commits where each one builds, but the ordering …