That's why you first ask the LLM: "tell me how you would do this, and ask me any clarifications and questions you may have, and share any other thoughts you may have. Don't implement yet."
The LLM will look through the codebase, think, and tell you what it would do and if there's any design decisions you would have to make, as well as other things you probably need to be aware of. Then you go through the LLM's output and address all those decisions point by point, asking the LLM more questions if something isn't clear or requires more investigation or you're unsure what to do. And end with "address what I wrote, and share any other thoughts or questions or things to clarify you might still have, don't implement yet"
And you do this back and forth until all the design decisions have been addressed and you feel confident of what the code and architecture will look like, and only then say "ok, implement"
That way you get a lot of the benefits of writing it by hand (being forced to think through what the best design would be and how it would integrate with existing code, and increasing understanding of how existing code works) but it's still much faster. The tool I personally use is Cursor in auto mode.
P.S. actually before even that you first ask the LLM "what is the current state of X in the codebase" and then you ask follow-up questions until you have a good understanding of all the details that are relevant to you. And then you can start having the design/implementation conversation in the same chat context, since having the above information in context is useful.
P.P.S. and you can also ask a bridge question like "can XYZ be cleanly added with how things are currently structured?" or "what would it take to add XYZ to the project?"
The LLM will look through the codebase, think, and tell you what it would do and if there's any design decisions you would have to make, as well as other things you probably need to be aware of. Then you go through the LLM's output and address all those decisions point by point, asking the LLM more questions if something isn't clear or requires more investigation or you're unsure what to do. And end with "address what I wrote, and share any other thoughts or questions or things to clarify you might still have, don't implement yet"
And you do this back and forth until all the design decisions have been addressed and you feel confident of what the code and architecture will look like, and only then say "ok, implement"
That way you get a lot of the benefits of writing it by hand (being forced to think through what the best design would be and how it would integrate with existing code, and increasing understanding of how existing code works) but it's still much faster. The tool I personally use is Cursor in auto mode.
P.S. actually before even that you first ask the LLM "what is the current state of X in the codebase" and then you ask follow-up questions until you have a good understanding of all the details that are relevant to you. And then you can start having the design/implementation conversation in the same chat context, since having the above information in context is useful.
P.P.S. and you can also ask a bridge question like "can XYZ be cleanly added with how things are currently structured?" or "what would it take to add XYZ to the project?"