> it's incredibly obvious that while these tools are surprisingly good at doing repetitive or locally-scoped tasks, they immediately fall apart when faced with the types of things that are actually difficult in software development and require non-trivial amounts of guidance and hand-holding to get things right

I used this line for a long time, but you could just as easily say the same thing for a typical engineer. It basically boils down to "Claude likes its tickets to be well thought out". I'm sure there is some size of project where its ability to navigate the codebase starts to break down, but I've fed it sizeable ones and so long as the scope is constrained it generally just works nowadays