To me building on multiple scalable systems this has been the most dangerous part of LLMs. On a good codebase it will work good, but it will maek it worse, so you keep using it, till it doesnt work and then you have to pay the bill and fix for what you didn’t build before.
If you put an agent on a fresh codebase 2 things are often given:
-> You have a mental model of the code -> The code is somewhet concise
After multiple iterations both is lost and LLM performance degrades. To solve this you can regular refactor, but it’s not a nice experienc. So my best solution is:
I use LLMs for exploration and for review, but I write the code myself. I find it hard to believe why so many engineers try to avoid it. It’s not consuming much of my time. And it’s actually the most enjoyable part.
Sometimes I race AI i give it a prompt /bug to fix and at the sametime im greping/symboling through the codebase and tryto fix it myself. AI isn’t always faster.
Gradually over its recent booming years, software work went from one of several practical engineering refuges for curious tinkers and puzzle-addicts to a career path for financially ambitious bright people akin to finance, law, or medicine.
Many people carrying a "software engineer" title now never really enjoyed that part of the work at all but were suitably clever and responsible to accomplish what modest ends they were tasked to by their very generous employers. Mostly (but not entirely), those people are the ones most eager to have AI agents shield them from rigorous design and puzzle work and enable them to leverage their innate cleverness more lazily. They never really internalized the coding and engineering principles of the industry and so can't foresee what might be down the road for them with this technique, especially when they're surrounded by peers with the same mindset.
> AI isn’t always faster.
It is when coding was an extremely frustrating and high friction experience for you in the first place, as is the case for many who work among us now.
At my workplace, there is more work to be done than there is engineers, and approximately 2 engineers per service. I can spin off multiple Claude Code instances on unrelated work, steering them occasionally, and then finally reviewing the output. After I have reviewed it, I post it for team review.
You're absolutely right that my depth of familiarity is lesser with this code, but we are absolutely shipping more as a result of increased parallelization.
The bottleneck now is typically reviews - both pre-push and team reviews.
That said, I've had lots of success using AI to learn, refactor and clean up codebases.
I notice another trend were a lot of AI naysayers haven't really spent a ton of time getting intimately familiar with AI.
Really? I always thought that was the best part of programming. And now that I can direct an LLM to identify a specific pattern and rework it in a certain way, or to extract a function for a specific purpose and then use it where possible (with my review, of course), so much the better.
I agree with you about the joy of writing things directly, overall. But being able to get a few hundred lines of new approximately-what-I-wanted-to-type code (which I generally can read and fix much faster than I would have written it from scratch) definitely improves the experience, when my brain is racing ahead of my fingers. Certainly it gets me more motivated to actually start on a new feature. Similarly for all the not-exactly-exact find-and-replace tasks.
(I'm not a slow typist, but I slow myself down when I write the code, by thinking too much about details that won't be important until after the tests run.)
+1 - this is also my experience. I also "race" the AI on some tasks, especially when it's simple and the AI is taking forever to return a result - so it even has a head start, and I often complete it faster or around the same time.
For some things maybe it is faster, but it isn't really returning a better result. It often turns into spaghetti, doing things I didn't ask it to do.
To be honest I'm not sure how true this is. I think it's more that there does seem to be quite a baked-in bias to repeat basic structures and not reuse (much less come up with) abstractions. So where that is the existing pattern it looks like it's keeping with that, when in reality it would often do that either way.
There have been many cases where I've started a piece of work by laying down very rigid abstractions and a few examples of using them, and I explicitly prompt to not only exclusively use the specific abstraction API but also copy the way I've used it. And the (frontier) LLM does neither, it just steams ahead re-implementing things from scratch from bottom up basic structures, partially and often totally ignoring the abstractions.
I don't know exactly why this should be the case but my naive suspicion is that there's just an awful lot of this type of stuff in the masses of training code and the weights just somehow 'know better' how to get results this way, rather than using your more novel abstractions/patterns.
Yup, this is the sad state of affairs that we’re currently in, and the only way to avoid this is to specifically instruct the model on how exactly to implement things.
From my point of view, I think this is fine, to be able to use these LLMs as fast implementation engines. The challenge is to make it surface these types of implementation decisions before it goes off doing it the wrong way.
One thing I usually keep having to point out directly is to remove all “progress tracking” code comments and make sure all comments are appropriate for long term maintenance in the code base. Claude tends to leave comments like “button click causes save now, no longer uses onBlur” when the code really never used onBlur, that was just a thing Claude wanted to do earlier in the same task/branch and I redirected it at some point.
I haven't used them so far but maybe these would work better than basic instructions for such cases.
If most people by your account are subpar programmers before AI, why do you believe they'll suddenly be better with AI?
Also, these comments always come off more than a bit anti-social. It's like hating your coworkers correlates strongly with AI-adoption.
The models will interpret this willynilly; but nonetheless, it's often a better than doing nothing.
The reason prompting it to review its own work for loose ends, record any new undocumented or noteworthy behavior, suggest changes to tests/processes to make it go more smoothly the next time, etc is that it’s prescriptive and process-oriented (and thus easily verifiable/done in-context) rather than descriptive and outcome oriented (which to do properly could require way more context than the model has, because it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know about your particular work, only what it’s seen so far).
Even promoting it to do these after-the-fact vs as an upfront requirement can have a big impact IMO. If you make “maintainability” part of the task before it’s seen the real work it will focus on general “best practices” crap rather than the real work, so either way if this is something you care about it doing you have to give it guidance for how you want it done.
If you were to review the logs of a model after the fact, you’d also not really save on input tokens unless you compressed the context or sharded it out, which can easily miss the small details that constitute the difference between “what actually happened” vs “how the LLM models this general class of problems” unless the first pass involves the entire context anyway. That said I do think there’s a lot of value in building some kind of pipeline for validating and aggregating these “learnings” across sessions.
I am following similar steps from this article https://www.lucasfcosta.com/blog/backpressure-is-all-you-nee...
"Add comments to your code under the assumption that the next person to maintain it is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live"
I recently reacted angrily in a PR review comment after encountering one for the umpteenth time... that caught me off guard. I didn't know I was capable of that.
> Only write comments to explain the why when it is not obvious from the code (rationale, gotchas, constraints). Do not comment on the what — well-named code already says it. Do not comment on how a framework works.
It still keeps adding these bad comments. When I then ask it to review the comments based on my preferences it then deletes most of them or improves them.
Today I asked Claude why it disrespects my preference and it said that the surrounding code was like that and it followed that style. It suggested I add this line to my global CLAUDE.md file:
> The comment rule above beats the style of the surrounding code: neighboring files with what-style comments are not license to write more of them, and comments carried along when porting or copying code must be re-judged against the rule, not kept for consistency.
Let's see if that improves things.
Maybe these would work better for such cases.
I have a lot of CLAUDE.md rules to restrict this stuff, but realize the “encapsulation” language is something I’m missing.
so that can be useful information in some situations.
On the other hand, what a horrible out of date mess of comment that can turn out to be a little bit later. Taken as gospel by the next entity (human or llm) to massage that function.
Normally when I can't get claude to follow a prompt I try a lint hook, but it's tough to lint something that subjective.
Years ago I would often write comments first. I.e. start with describing the overall goals. Then break it down into routines and order of operations, all still in plain english. Once I was happy with that, I'd break up the comments with blocks of code. I guess this is sort of like "literate programming" though I was doing it long before I ever heard that term and I still have never read much about it. It's almost more like I was prompting myself towards the end goal. The downside of this approach is that the comments do end up more or less just explaining in english what the code is doing, so maybe aren't quite as useful to future maintainers.
The big problem is folks misunderstood it as documentation (arguably plain.tex should have also been the sourcecode for _The TeXbook_ and that it wasn't is a big part of this) --- it could be, but usually that's better as a separate text/chapter....
I've been trying to collect books on Literate Program/notable Literate Programs published as books:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...
and I will note that my own programming took a quantum leap forward when I purchased and read:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39996759-a-philosophy-of...
and applied its principles one chapter at a time to a project which I was able (w/ a bit of help) to get into Literate Programming form:
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview/blob/main/literati...
Use short names where they're contextually clear. Use long names where they're contextually weird/non-belonging. Use comments to explain the "whys" of your code.
I've also seen a lot of comments that restate what the code already says and that's just noise, more work to keep in sync, an additional thing that can fail, and more cognitive load because you have to read twice the same thing (best case, if code and comment are still in sync). That's the result you risk when you think you must comment your code.
I appreciate the occasional comment that explains why something seems overly tricky or weird or not immediately intuitive. Once, I had left such a comment that saved myself years later from making a mistake. Of course, this should be kept at a minimal level. It leads to me liking clear code with few comments the most. (Some guidelines, even if it's not perfect, to limit complexity and spaghetti code help a lot).
Function, class, module documentation is also useful so you don't have to read the whole thing and you know what it's intended to provide (which is slightly different than simply what it provides, and this differences is important).
Clear code takes precedence over commented code if either of them could be used to solve the problem of communicating what's going on; comments are still useful in the cases where clear code isn't always enough. Of course, being able to discern whether there's a way to make the code cleaner to avoid needing a comment is an art rather than a science, and it's a skill that I think few people excel at (and judging by how so much LLM-generated code is littered with inane comments, one that's also pretty rare in agents)
Edit: this small things drive me crazy when I’m coding with LLM… which is basically all the time these days, but I also read all the code as well.
The standards most "good developer" humans demand were learned from many decades of painful experience about what happens when you do it the other way. These are not only compromises for human convenience, they often are things that we have learned will come back to bite you later even though they just add more work today for no gain.
Another thing is competitive edge, if you use claude and your competitors use claude then nothing really gives you an edge. AI is a commodity, not competitive edge.
The competitive pressure should drive human work because it's unique.
Often small technical changes like "making a service 5% faster" are worth millions for large companies. That's all implementation.
If you want LLMs to be your advantage you can train your own, that's completely valid.
Let's say you want to have a company that runs inference 5% faster, if everyone can do it your business model is worthless.
(Also performance and security issues, addressing which doesn't make the code more readable, but does make the program itself more robust.)
That being said... I have found them weirdly unsuitable for some tasks though, e.g. asking frontier LLMs to assist me with game development, I found that they were not able to add simple features to a simple Pong clone (nor even port a working Pong implementation) without constantly breaking things. (Yes, Pong, from 1972!)
So, I want to say YMMV, but just the past 2 weeks, my own mileage has varied very much! They seem to be extremely domain specific.
"Half the time, it works every time!"
1. Created a "coding" skill with every practice I posted on my blog website, as well as a bunch I had in the queue to blog about but never got a chance, summarized into "do this" kind of language. This is more or less good for any PL, but a bit Ruby-slanted.
2. Created a "rails" skill because that's my framework, where similarly I explained my approach to architecting Rails apps.
3. Created a "writing" skill where I literally fed it my entire blog, and tried to get it to write more like me (mixed success, weaker models did better for some reason, but I haven't tried the GPT-5.6 series yet).
4. Next, I really wanted it to format code exactly like I would, even things like "let's make this `if` into a ternary, let's split these assignment groups with a line break, let's vertically align here, but not there", but with GPT-5.5 (my primary driver up until yesterday) there's almost no way to make a skill of reasonable size that will be consistently applied. So instead I instructed the agent to write me a Rubocop cop for every single situation I ever encounter where I would've formatted code slightly differently. This was quite powerful, because I usually thought of linters as enforcers of objective consistency decisions in the codebase, but this was me going full format nazi on the agent. And the nice part is that these cops can contain some non-autocorrectable feedback, which AI will follow.
5. I'm working on a review loop where the most easily missed parts above get double checked. This is the first thing I'm doing with pi subagents. (I feel like I'm getting better results if I don't use subagents for code exploration, other tool calls). The idea here is that I want reviews to be in the implementation loop. I always read/review code in the end, but so want it to have gone through the review loop before it gets to me. Since implementation is already context-heavy, I want to be able to orchestrate this loop without adding to the implementation context.
6. I'm also adjusting all of the above for GPT-5.6, because it requires less guidance, so I'm carefully trimming the verbiage to save tokens.
So far the results have been surprisingly good. I want to experiment with GLM-5.2 running under these constraints.
One invariant in all of this: I read the code. My end product is not working software, it's good code (which also incidentally produces working software).
* define the software layers, their function, and the max depth allowed
* establish a corp code formatter for each language, along with a process to PR it
* establish a business vocabulary and what the terms mean
* establish a data dictionary, make it part of the database schema/table/col comments
Are far more successful with LLMs. You _should_ have been doing this years ago, but with LLMs its a super power.
Easier said than done to be honest, especially if there are many people (and their agents) pushing code. It’s hard to keep up these days.
I think I would prefer code that is clear, understandable and simple even if it doesn’t compile and needs some straightforward polishing.
You'd be surprised how readable this makes the code when XXX is about the size of your vertical screen and Y is relatively small.
Maybe someone has the perfect claude.md that solves this problem but I have not seen it.
Instead modularize the knowledge with skills and specialized MD files. Agent should lazy load what is needed to do focused work.
Skills have usage description metadata, but with free files you can simply instruct agent with CLAUDE.md to load them, e.g.: "Before you attempt to change any frontend code first load and follow `docs/{JS|HTML|CSS}_coding_rules.md`".
There's a huge cost to Clean-Code-style DRY'ing of your codebase which is that you wind up creating all kinds of little functions that all add cognitive overhead to reading your codebase, and that premature DRY'ing can lead to picking the wrong abstractions.
If you can tolerate a bunch of copypasta, you can sit back after you've written 5,000 or 10,000 lines of code and can look at the actual result, instead of speculating, and make better-informed decisions about how to clean the codebase up. If you're making those decisions the first time you copy a bit of code around, you can wind up making a worse mess, since you often don't know where you're going.
code review has always been a liability fig leaf. it is much harder to understand a system from reading the code than writing the code. if AI can write code 100X faster than humans it is simply impossible for humans to do real code review. effectively it is just pretending to do code review, and then running unaudited code without the proper systemic security guardrails in place.
I started using AI with the best intentions. Checking everything before committing. Improving output by hand if it didn't quite follow the existing code style guidelines or variables were not named as well as they should be. Or if it did something sloppy or hacky.
Now, AI GOES BURRRRRRRRRRRR! If the tests pass it's good to ship. AI can deal with the problems it may create. No problems so far.
To make up some hypothetical numbers in order to illustrate with math: if you ship bugfixes 10x faster but then have 11x more bugs you need to fix, that's not a net improvement. Even if it's only 5x more bugs, maybe you could reduce that to 2x if you changed how you worked to only be 8x as fast in a way that produced higher quality code. Similarly, maybe you could cut the time it needed to produce a new feature by 50% if your code were higher quality by moving 20% slower.
My point in all of this isn't that you literally need to work the same way you did before you had these tools, but that framing it as either "move fast and ignore the code" and "use the same exact heuristics you would in the pre-LLM days for what code is acceptable" is a false dichotomy. If you aren't thinking about how effectively you're using these tools and whether there are changes you could make to move even faster because "AI go brrr", I think you've lost the plot in the same way you probably think that other people in this thread have.
Manual edits literally aren’t possible. You can’t grok the code growth and the new patterns fast enough to be productive.
This does work. I’ve seen it in real products. Nobody has a real mental model of the code flows. But with enough money in Claude credits it doesn’t matter.
The spend to support this development model is something like $50/day/developer.
This work great until you reach a certain size, then good (or even "not bad") code is required otherwise the model spins its wheel trying to ensure the change is correct.
The way I've measured how good/bad the code is (for AI) is to have one "baseline fixed change" that I measure how long time it takes to implement. Always in the beginning (less than 10K LOC, as just some measurement), this baseline change will take 2-3 minutes. As you add more code, the same change starts to take 5-6 minutes, and once you hit 1 million LOC, it can take as long as 10 minutes, even though the change is the same.
It's when this baseline task starts to take longer time, that you need to update the design/architecture/layout/whatever, to better fit the task/domain, and to actually make it easy to maintain and still possible to add changes without spending 10 minutes. So its at this point you refactor, and once done, the baseline task will again be easy for the model to do.
So yeah, if all you do is smaller projects, then "shipping 10x as many features" is easy and doable, for the lifetime of the projects. But once the projects start to accumulate technical debt, the model will have a harder time making sure the changes are correct, and suddenly "shipping 2x as many features" is maybe doable, but you could still have had 10x if you just spend slightly more time on the actual design and architecture of the program.
The solution, as you say, is probably to break it down into isolated sub-components that are only aware of each other's APIs and nothing more.
I understand you're excited about the tool, but for the sake of earnest discussion here, maybe commenters like yourself can tone the hype down to plausibility?
Claims like this are just nonsense. It's not how product development works.
How do you even have so many bugs left to fix if the tool is so fast and productive? Surely, you didn't have a backlog of tens of thousands of bugs that you're still chewing through? And of course, the volume of new bugs much be minimal since the AI-composed additions introduce "no problems so far". If it works like you say, which we'll accept in good faith per HN guidelines, you must have exhausted your backlog long ago.
And if you've indeed exhausted your bug backlog long ago (incredible!), you're left to talking about shipping "10x as many features". Yet no product has a limitless capacity for features. Nobody would want to use software so bloated and churning that was gaining features at such a pace. And who is designing and specifying them so quickly anyway? If it works like you say, which we again accept in good faith, you must have stalled out on your feature list long ago.
If the AI indeed allows you to "[ship] 10x as many features and bugfixes", and we take what you say in good faith, then one of the following seems to be implied:
* you've fixed all your bugs and blew through your mature feature designs already, leaving your AI agents sitting idle for all but a few hours a week, while you're bottlenecked on feature design and your software product is bloated beyond imagination
* your coding productivity before AI was absolutely glacial by industry standards such that "10x" productivity for you is actually much closer to "0.5-2x" for others
Any insight into which of those it might be?
Anthropic themselves have admitted you don’t need much to poison LLMs¹. I can’t wait for us to discover the backdoors that are being introduced. I hope it happens soon so people get to their senses. Bah, what am I saying, when (not if) that happens, the response will just be to throw more LLMs at it.
Where it really, really struggles for me is in existing complex infra codebases.
disagree, then you end up with something this this
function checkAll(target, conditions) { return Object.entries(conditions).every(([path, expected]) => { const value = path.split('.').reduce((o, k) => o?.[k], target); return typeof expected === 'function' ? expected(value, target) : value === expected; }); }
and const ok = checkAll({ user, account }, { 'user.isActive': true, 'user.isSuspended': false, 'account.status': 'open', 'user': u => u.hasPermission('read'), // predicate for the trickier bit });
how is that better?
(Because it's true.)
Taken from: https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load/blob/main/READM...
Getting away from stuff like this is exactly why I want to use AI. When I say "implement this for idle but active users," I _want_it to define isUserActiveIdle() and stuff these 4 conditionals in it. Having to check the generated code for stuff like this undoes, like .... all the benefit of using AI.
AI makes all these little decisions for us. I can about some of these decisions. I just want to notice when it's doing this without having to make my eyes bleed reading 10k lines of generated code a day.
At a minimum, there should be precommit checks and CI workflows that cause PRs to fail if the documentation is not up-to-date and synced with the other docs.
Then regular codebase analysis for improvement. This is where you find the bug sources, make new modules for consolidation, and get those +5000/-4000 PRs that people stuck in the world of manual code review hate.
One pattern I've really been enjoying lately has to do with a language called haxe. It's designed to be compiled into other languages (java, python, others). There's this extension called reflaxe which lets you make mini compilers for compiling haxe into pretty much anything.
So if I have anything with duplicate structure... like maybe I want the CLI subcommands to resemble the http API.
$ foo bar --baz 6 # produces similar output as HTTP GET /foo/bar?baz=6
Previously I was using OpenAPI spec's and generators for this, but they wound up feeling like a black box that I ended up debugging all the time. The reflaxe setup is much more generic. So you end up with this mountain of generated code, but unlike LLM-generated code it's obviously generated (in .../generated/thingy.py or whatever) and a comment at the top of the file says where to look to learn how it's generated). I'm generating docs this way, accessor functions for database tables and SQL for making those tables, matching clients and servers in different languages... it replaces a lot of purpose built tools with just one, and LLMs are pretty good at it.
So even though the repo is large, the parts of it that are authoritative remain small. I find LLM's manage this boundary much better because it's so crisp an in their face. But they have to be told to do this, otherwise they'll just create context-size problems that they'll later struggle with.
Of course you could do this with yaml files or some such, but unlike yaml, haxe has a type system, you can write tests in it, so the agent can notice fundamental flaws before the generation happens... with yaml those flaws would be propagated into the generated code before they'd get noticed.
Otherwise what I have found is that the LLM will add a new if statement which will handle the newly discovered issue and you start stacking them ifs. As the article mentions LLM's unlike humans aren't lazy, they will copy, paste add patches for every issue, why bother think and understand root cause :d.
So as part of our review we have a rule against that as well.
The benefit is that a human who is a junior might need at least a few weeks to months of guidance to have a good taste of when to duplicate and when to DRY. An LLM likely already has good judgment, and your prompt merely needs to be activate this judgment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20049 https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13280
> we are not going back to hand-writing these functions
do you really think there isn't a good chunk, if not the majority outside some bubbles, of developers that still hand code? Crazy to hear, I bet you're not a programmer
Of course, this doesn't solve the overall issue that agents don't write code like you and still requires a lot of human attention in planning and code review out to clean up leftover issues, and e.g. challenge bad assumptions about architecture and real-world context. A human is still very much needed to cull the slop (or, more gratuitously: align the agent). But IME it does help avoid a lot of pitfalls and makes the code high quality a lot more quickly.
Funny enough, discussed this yesterday
Stop Optimizing Code for Humans https://youtube.com/live/eLn4-XA-KdQ?feature=share
For personal projects, I can trust that I myself will be maintaining things so I still write things like it matters, but I do not extend the trust to others.
You can have all the prompts you want on top of this, but if you don't have this automated stuff running behind the scenes, you aren't serious about these issues.
Looking through some of these comments here, I see lots of people rewriting concrete rules in markdown willing to spend tokens on the hope AI won't miss it where an actual program won't.
— John F. Woods (1991)
bottom up AI use seems a godsend compared to the corporate AI rat race.
i setup some slop reporting systems and ensured my boss knows theyre great starting points but serious use requires real time investment.
I’m pretty sure many people who use AI to write emails or blog posts add "make it sound like a human wrote it" to their prompts. We all know what the result usually looks like.
If AI is writing my code, I'd rather have it focus purely on correctness and efficiency than on making the code easy to read.
heck! I might even ask it to imitate Arthur Whitney’s style.
/s
I eventually read the library docs and managed to build a scraper for what I wanted in a few mins. Llms are great for a lot of things, but sometimes you stumble in something that's just outside of what they know/can do and you're sol. And of all the thinks, I didn't expect they would fail at this, to be honest the opposite
[More seriously, the comment you replied to doesn't put out any desperation. It's stated like a fact. It could easily be based on logic & reason, not emotional desperation.]
I've been doing this for 15 years, I love coding manually.
However, with AI-assistance I can do projects in 3 days what would take 6 months.
It's not vibe coding, everything is controlled, reviewed, understood, refined by me in the end.
But still the dev time is magnitudes faster. I would not hire anyone that is adverse to AI.
I'm actually happier. With age and a family I was getting a bit slower.
Now I have more time to spend with them AND I'm getting more done. Including personal projects I never had the bandwidth for.
The hyperbole on this keeps growing every time I see it. Soon we’ll be having people claiming they can do in 12 seconds what used to take them 17 years. What is never presented is proof. People (and programmers are no exception) are notoriously bad at estimating. We already did studies where people thought they were being faster with LLMs when they were in fact being slower.
As companies begin to rehire to fix the mess made by LLMs, it’s clear that just getting something out the door isn’t enough. It never was. Maintenance is an important part of any long-standing system.
Likewise, I think they're having wildly different results. Look at how differently humans drive vehicles, and realize they're doing the same with compute. Some people probably are working at light speed, and some people are actually slower like in the study.
And had to work on ios/android/web.
I'd consider myself a pretty fast programmer, and I grind 12 hours at a time, everyday until it's done.
But between all humans it's a rounding error compared to the output of an agent swarm.
For personal projects, I pick and choose how much to use AI. But for work, agents go brrrr.
And the last project truly would have taken me 6 months.
It was done in 3 days after fable 1:1 the design, setup the infrastructure, and turned all tasks and specs into code.
Everything was done day 1, but it took 2 days to manually clean it, test, and correct small issues.
--
But that does make sense you're seeing "hyperboles" grow, AI is getting better very quickly, so you'll see the time saved estimations grow.
Less than a year ago I'd say it was saving me about a month of work, mainly because it sucked at UI.
I'm paid to provide good quality code and not flood my company with more average code than it should.
In my previous job, I could regularly reduce a PR code down to 10-20%% of its size because someone overlooked something or was just "overengineer" a feature.
AI are such "bullshiters" that they produce more text than necessary.
Code bloat was already real, but from my personal experience it becomes realer with AI. The outcome of this will likely be apparent when no one can dive into any code base because of the amount of fluff in it (and you will obviously need more AI to deal with this).
¹ As if “moving forward” or “progress” were always a positive. It’s not. Just look at how many regulations we have to forbid or curtail uses of stuff we found to be harmful.
Mine starts with “Enter plan mode. Examine the differences on this branch vs. main. Consider: ...” and proceeds to a bullet list of things.
Any time I notice something in code review and have to get the agent to fix it.. I throw it on the list!
My list is like 200 items now. Know what? Agents don’t care that they just got a wall of generic feedback, they happily look into all the bullet points.
I added “ensure the new things aren’t duplicating code that already exists elsewhere” and it gave me such a surprise - it really truly started planning cleanups!
We are just scratching the surface. We have to give tools to our tools so they can use them to be better tools for us.
This is a gripe I've had with AI tools for a while now. Though it's gotten somewhat better in time, but we don't really know what to expect from the tool in terms of quality. Ex. I'd expect a human engineer to probably not use a brand new assertion library for a new test when there are 200 tests using an existing one. But Claude has done this to me multiple times. So I have to add yet another item to the list, like you have, and tell it to look for testing conventions before writing. But, there is plenty we don't have to tell it, like what a function is or a test should probably cover the change in the diff. But we don't really have a list of what things are on each side so we're just left to sort of hunt and peck to build a viable solution.
/init will make a project-wide one, or you can instruct it to "Create CLAUDE.md in any sub-directory that is sufficiently complex" then modify from there.
I am curious what does it contain, for me a lot of times its a back and forth with agent until it "looks good to my eyes and taste", but haven't written any such list yet, because it is context dependant, in some projects I forgive minor issues, or allow magical numbers, but in other projects I force agent to use constants with meaningful names `SECONDS_IN_A_DAY = 24 * 60 * 60`
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell
*edit: that wikipedia page ^ itself is a pretty answer to your request for a list of things to avoid when writing maintainable code.
For a Rust project, I created macros that output compiler errors when documentation and tests are not in a shape I want them to be, like missing function invocations or assertions, which forces the agent to address them, where otherwise they would've just worked around them by adding stupid trivial assertions like `assert_eq!(true, true)`.
That still isn't fool-proof either, but it helps minimise those instances. I'm bullish on the idea of integrating formal methods and model-checking with AI. I think that combo feels like a promising avenue for constraining the stochastic side of AI-generated code with something closer to deterministic verification. Provided you can write correct specs of course!
* https://github.com/alibaba/open-code-review
** https://layandreas.github.io/personal-blog/posts/beyond-vide...
Failing that they default to the most common style they were trained on. Which, at this point, is mostly code they wrote...
Good way to double your token use though, if you’re concerned about that.
What ever happened to communicating through code?
Agents can follow examples and infer patterns, and they can read commit history and diffs. Real-world commit logs for human-only projects are dominated by short commits (well, at least the ones where the humans are skilled, appreciate version control, care about the project, etc.) with thoughtful commit messages.
cf. https://wiki.c2.com/?JustCorrectDontPoint
Yes, yes, there has been a library of information on HN by now about how to use agents effectively. (And I'm grateful for that, because I can keep current and in the loop without feeling enslaved to the new style of development.)
None of that is a reason not to do what the title of TFA says. If your review process is doing the right thing, you should observe that it results in your agent moving the code in the "human-maintainable" direction. If you, for whatever reason, actually directly make commits yourself any more (read this ironically; I genuinely can't understand why anyone would want to give up on that, no matter how good the generated code gets, because "the LLM could do better" is not the point), then of course you should write it to be human-maintainable.
The reason humans find "human-maintainable" code to be maintainable is because maintainability is one of the precious few worthwhile at-least-vaguely-objective metrics of code quality we have.
Every time I see someone try to make a point about the fact that some code actually is just better than other code, only to be met with more of this sort of advice, I start to wonder whether I was alone in ever actually enjoying programming.
WTF - I need to implement a review command to guide to do its job properly.
Can you imagine any other industry charging people money for a product like this ?
When you are charging people money - scratching the surface cannot be an excuse.
Will try your approach to distill the code to bullet points.