alt Hacker NewsYou can't get away from the engineering part of software engineering even if you are using LLMs. I have been using Claude Opus 4.5, and it's the best out of the models I have tried. I find that I can get Claude to work well if I already know the steps I need to do beforehand, and I can get it to do all of the boring stuff. So it's a series of very focused and directed one-shot prompts that it largely gets correct, because I'm not giving it a huge task, or something open-ended.
Knowing how you would implement the solution beforehand is a huge help, because then you can just tell the LLM to do the boring/tedious bits.
Replies
They’re good for getting you from A to B. But you need to know A (current state of the code) and how to get to B (desired end state). They’re fast typers not automated engineers.
seriously, I stopped agent mode altogether. I hit it with very specific like: write a function that takes an array of X and returns y.
It almost never fails and usually does it in a neat way, plus its ~50 lines of code so I can copy and paste confidently. Letting the agent just go wild on my code has always been a PITA for me.