alt Hacker NewsHere's what I suggest:
Serious planning. The plans should include constraints, scope, escalation criteria, completion criteria, test and documentation plan.
Enforce single responsibility, cqrs, domain segregation, etc. Make the code as easy for you to reason about as possible. Enforce domain naming and function / variable naming conventions to make the code as easy to talk about as possible.
Use code review bots (Sourcery, CodeRabbit, and Codescene). They catch the small things (violations of contract, antipatterns, etc.) and the large (ux concerns, architectural flaws, etc.).
Go all in on linting. Make the rules as strict as possible, and tell the review bots to call out rule subversions. Write your own lints for the things the review bots are complaining about regularly that aren't caught by lints.
Use BDD alongside unit tests, read the .feature files before the build and give feedback. Use property testing as part of your normal testing strategy. Snapshot testing, e2e testing with mitm proxies, etc. For functions of any non-trivial complexity, consider bounded or unbounded proofs, model checking or undefined behaviour testing.
I'm looking into mutation testing and fuzzing too, but I am still learning.
Pause for frequent code audits. Ask an agent to audit for code duplication, redundancy, poor assumptions, architectural or domain violations, TOCTOU violations. Give yourself maintenance sprints where you pay down debt before resuming new features.
The beauty of agentic coding is, suddenly you have time for all of this.
Replies
> Serious planning. The plans should include constraints, scope, escalation criteria, completion criteria, test and documentation plan.
I feel like i am a bit stupid to be not able to do this. my process is more iterative. i start working on a feature then i disocover some other function thats silightly related. go refactor into commmon code then proceed with original task. sometimes i stop midway and see if this can be done with a libarary somewhere and go look at example. i take many detours like these. I am never working on a single task like a robot. i dont want claude to work like that either .That seems so opposite of how my brain works.
what i am missing.
Can't upvote you enough. This is the way. You aren't vibe coding slop you have built an engineering process that works even if the tools aren't always reliable. This is the same way you build out a functioning and highly effective team of humans.
The only obvious bit you didn't cover was extensive documentation including historical records of various investigations, debug sessions and technical decisions.
To be devil's advocate:
Many of those tools are overpowered unless you have a very complex project that many people depend on.
The AI tools will catch the most obvious issues, but will not help you with the most important aspects (e.g. whether you project is useful, or the UX is good).
In fact, having this complexity from the start may kneecap you (the "code is a liability" cliché).
You may be "shipping a lot of PRs" and "implementing solid engineering practices", but how do you know if that is getting closer to what you value?
How do you know that this is not actually slowing your down?