Sounded to me like you need a plan.

My approach is to take the statement of work or problem definition and iterate on that myself until I'm really clear on what is the goal. I therefore have a good some good ideas about what the plan should be.

If extending an existing application, which is usually the case, then make use of the plan documents that I had written before AI arrived on the scene. These sre documents in markdown form that say step-by-step how to, for example, add a new report to the system.

It makes some plausible choices and you can retroactively ask it to make different ones later, if you want.