ate $15-20 Claude credits in less than ten minutes.

Lay off of MAX mode.

Also, if you're paying API rates, look into the subscription options - I can't burn the $200 subscription plan down much below 50% without pushing prompts into Claude every waking hour (unless I turn on MAX mode). At API rates? I can burn $50 in a few hours.

do what I haven’t ever done: decline the whole PRs as they contain a lot of architectural changes that complexify the system in order to achieve the goal.

If you're accepting the first thing the agent gives you, you're almost certainly "doing it wrong" - gate it before it goes down a bad rabbithole and redirect it, in writing, in architecture documents (which it can draft for you, and correct based on your guidance) - and when it ignores those architecture documents, which it will do when things get big and complex, break the architecture documents down into smaller chunks that apply to the various tasks at hand - yes, it can do this breakdown for you too and that's another opprotunity for you to guide the process. I try to frame the output I get from AI in my mind as: usually about 80% correct / useful, and it's my job to identify that other 20% (which, in reality, is getting a lot smaller lately), and beef up the specifications and descriptions of the job until it can get everything to an acceptable state.

I don’t trust it and have to recheck every single scenario. I trust junior engineer in our team more than I trust this instrument.

That would depend entirely on which junior engineer your are talking about, for me. I don't trust Claude, either. But for the most part I have Claude check itself, at an appropriately granular level. If you've got more than 2000 lines of Claude's code that doesn't have good visibility into what its doing, why its doing it, and what the outputs should look like... you're trusting it too much. But it can write that documentation and testing for you, you just have to review it - at an appropriate level. If you're trying to do it line by line of code for a big project, maybe you should still be writing it yourself instead.

I am vastly prefering copilot over claude, using sonnet 4.5~4.6 for most tasks and then pulling out opus as "the big guns" for tougher stuff sonnet cant handle easy

Copilot is only costing me ~$28 a month, which gets me 1500 premium requests per month

If you set up your flows well, 1 premium request is an entire session, so Im only paying like 2.4 cents for 20 minutes of work