I now have dozens of projects where I've embraced the yolo. I went through elaborate systems, workflows, review triages, architectural linters, specialist agents, yet, they all still suffered the same fate - slop which I don't understand and now LLMs don't understand either.

The only thing that worked was a standing instruction and periodic system reminder injected from the harness:

"If any assumption doesn't hold, if there's a fork in the road, any architectural decision needs be made, STOP and report back to the user. Do not try to push through the problem."

This has worked remarkably well for me. Now I have to think a whole lot more. It's much slower, yes, but I don't really see any other way that doesn't end up in garbage.