Interrupting and correcting

You are part of the loop. Watching it go the wrong way and waiting politely for it to finish is the most expensive thing you can do.

There are two ways to say something while it is working, and they are not the same.

Esc is for wrong direction: it is reading the wrong files, or about to rewrite something it should not touch. Typing is for a correction that can wait a few seconds, which is most of them, and it keeps the work it has already done.

Messages you type while it is busy are queued and sent next, so you can line up the next instruction without breaking the current one.

Correcting well

The instinct is to explain in detail what it should have done. The better move is usually shorter: say what is wrong, and where you think the problem is.

That's not quite right. The issue is in the session handling, not the login form.

It keeps everything it has already learned about your project, drops the line of investigation it was on, and starts on the file you named.

You do not have to start over, and you should not. The conversation still holds everything it learned about your project, and that context is the expensive part.

Delegate rather than dictate

The documentation's own advice, and it holds up: give it the problem and the direction, not the steps. Naming every file to read and every command to run turns an agent back into a very slow text editor.

The checkout flow is broken for users with expired cards.
The relevant code is in src/payments/. Can you investigate and fix it?

Nothing in that message says which files to read or which commands to run. That is the part you are delegating.