Comment by diggan
6 days ago
> It’s way more cognitively demanding than writing code the old-fashioned way
How are you using it?
I've been mainly doing "pair programming" with my own agent (using Devstral as of late) and find the reviewing much easier than it would been to literally type all of the code it produces, at least time wise.
I've also tried vibe coding for a bit, and for that I'd agree with you, as you don't have any context if you end up wanting to review something. Basically, if the project was vibe coded from the beginning, it's much harder to get into the codebase.
But when pair programming with the LLM, I already have a built up context, and understand how I want things to be and so on, so reviewing pair programmed code goes a lot faster than reviewing vibe coded code.
I’ve tried a bunch of things but now I’m mostly using Cursor in agent mode with Claude Sonnet 4, doing small-ish pull-request-sized prompts. I don’t have to review code as carefully as I did with Claude 3.7
but I’m finding the bottleneck now is architecture design. I end up having these long discussions with chatGPT-o3 about design patterns, sometimes days of thinking, and then relatively quick implementation sessions with Cursor
It will be interesting to see if and how all of this improves standards around how we document the architecture and concepts of software.