Comment by Shebanator

Those kinds of errors were super common 4-6 months ago, but LLM quality moves fast. Nowadays I don't see these very often at all. Two things that make a huge difference: work on writing a spec first. github.speckit, GSD, BMAD, whatever tool you like can help with this. Do several passes on the spec to refine it and focus on the key ideas.

Now that you have a spec, task it out, but tell the LLM to write the tests first (like Test-Driven Development, but without all the formalisms). This forces the LLM to focus on the desired behavior instead of the algorithms. Be sure to focus on tests that focus on real behavior: client apis doing the right error handling when you get bad input, handling tricky cases, etc. Tell the system not to write 'struct' tests - checking that getters/setters work isn't interesting or useful.

Then you implement 1-3 tasks at a time, getting the tests to pass. The rules prevent disabling tests, commenting out tests, and, most importantly, changing the behavior of the tests. Doesn't use a lot of context, little to no hallucinating, and easily measurable progress.