I can't upvote ya enough. There's some kind of Clever Hans thing where people aren't honest with how much fudging they have to do, or how brittle the results are.
I made this blog post, because I did very little fudging and was shocked by how good the results are. However, this only happened with the latest model (o3). That's why I wanted to describe my approach. First, give AI the model / architecture description, and make sure it understands. Then proceed to the code.
Yep, I've heard many people have much stronger results with o3 and am glad it's working for them! I think it would help if you could dig up and publish at least a few of your chats through ideation/architecture, initial implementation, refinement, testing, etc. It might help those of us luddites who can't seem to make even o3 work the way we want it to.