alt Hacker NewsIn my experience, it’s even more effort to get good code with an agent-when writing by hand, I fully understand the rationale for each line I write. With ai, I have to assess every clause and think about why it’s there. Even when code reviewing juniors, there’s a level of trust that they had a reason for including each line (assuming they’re not using ai too for a moment); that’s not at all my experience with Codex.
Last month I did the majority of my work through an agent, and while I did review its work, I’m now finding edge cases and bugs of the kind that I’d never have expected a human to introduce. Obviously it’s on me to better review its output, but the perceived gains of just throwing a quick bug ticket at the ai quickly disappear when you want to have a scalable project.
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You need to have the AI write an increasingly detailed design and plan about what to code, assess the plan and revise it incrementally, then have it write code as planned and assess the code. You're essentially guiding the "Thinking" the AI would have to perform anyway. Yes, it takes more time and effort (though you could stop at a high-level plan and still do better than not planning at all), but it's way better than one-shotted vibe code.
I hear you, but it seems quicker to predict whether the agent's solution is correct/sound before running it than to compose and "start" coding yourself. Understanding something that's already there seems like less effort. But I guess it highly depends on what you are doing and its level of complexity and how much you're offloading your authority and judgment.
Throw your next bug at this: https://skills.sh/obra/superpowers/systematic-debugging
There is demand for non scalable, not committed to be maintained code where smaller issues can tolerated. This demand is currently underserved as coding is somewhat expensive and focused on critical functions.