You can steer it though. When I see it going off the reservation I steer it back. I also commit often, just about after every prompt cycle, so I can easily revert and pick up the ball in a fresh context.

But yeah, I saw a suggestion about adding a long-lived agent that would keep track of salient points (so kinda memory) but also monitor current progress by main agent in relation to the "memory" and give the main agent commands when it detects that the current code clashes with previous instructions or commands. Would be interesting to see if it would help.

They also don't understand how exceptions work. They'll try-catch everything, print the error, and continue. If I see a big diff, I know it just added 10 try-catches in random parts of my codebase.

I never use xhigh due to overthinking. I find high nearly always works better.

Purely anecdotal.