alt Hacker News> but I did not feel that I knew the codebase enough to be able to actually assess the correctness of the change.
The good engineering approach is to verify that the change is correct. More prompts for the AI does nothing, instead play with the code, try to break it, write more tests yourself.
I exhausted my ability to do this (without AI). It was a codebase I don't know, in a language I don't know, solving a problem that I have a very limited viewpoint of.
These are all reasons why pre-AI I'd never have bothered to even try this, it wouldn't be worth my time.
If you think this is therefore "bad engineering", maybe that's true! As I said, I ended up discarding the change because I wasn't happy with it.