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czhu12yesterday at 6:15 PM8 repliesview on HN

The problem I’ve been having is that when Claude generates copious amounts of code, it makes it way harder to review than small snippets one at a time.

Some would argue there’s no point reviewing the code, just test the implementation and if it works, it works.

I still am kind of nervous doing this in critical projects.

Anyone just YOLO code for projects that’s not meant to be one time, but fully intend to have to be supported for a long time? What are learnings after 3-6 months of supporting in production?


Replies

serial_devyesterday at 6:42 PM

In a professional setting where you still have coding standards, and people will review your code, and the code actually reaches hundreds of thousands of real users, handling one agent at a time is plenty for me. The code output is never good enough, and it makes up stuff even for moderately complicated debugging ("Oh I can clearly see the issue now", I heard it ten times before and you were always wrong!)

I do use them, though, it helps me, search, understand, narrow down and ideate, it's still a better Google, and the experience is getting better every quarter, but people letting tens or hundreds of agents just rip... I can't imagine doing it.

For personal throwaway projects that you do because you want to reach the end output (as opposed to learning or caring), sure, do it, you verify it works roughly, and be done with it.

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gen220yesterday at 6:25 PM

In my (admittedly conflict-of-interest, I work for graphite/cursor) opinion, asking CC to stack changes, and then having an automated reviewer agent help a lot with digesting and building conviction in otherwise-large changesets.

My "first pass" of review is usually me reading the PR stack in graphite. I might iterate on the stack a few times with CC before publishing it for review. I have agents generate much of my code, but this workflow has allowed me to retain ownership/understanding of the systems I'm shipping.

linsomniacyesterday at 8:14 PM

I have Claude Code author changes, and then I use this "codex-review" skill I wrote that does a review of the last commit. You might try asking Codex (or whatever) to review the change to give you some pointers to focus on with your review, and also in your review you can see if Codex was on track or if it missed anything, maybe feed that back into your codex review prompt.

AstroBenyesterday at 6:30 PM

I think we'll start to see the results of that late this year, but it's a little early yet. Plenty of people are diving headfirst into it

To me it feels like building your project on sand. Not a good idea unless it's a sandcastle

idontwantthisyesterday at 6:22 PM

I just can’t get with this. There is so much beyond “works” in software. There are requirements that you didn’t know about and breaking scenarios that you didn’t plan for and if you don’t know how the code works, you’re not going to be able to fix it. Assuming an AI could fix any problem given a good enough prompt, I can’t write that prompt without sufficient knowledge and experience in the codebase. I’m not saying they are useless, but I cannot just prompt, test and ship a multiservice, asynchronous, multidb, zero downtime app.

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chasingyesterday at 9:41 PM

Yeah, it's not just my job to generate the code: It's my job to know the code. I can't let code out into the wild that I'm not 100% willing to vouch for.

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szundiyesterday at 6:21 PM

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