Comment by sottol

I think another thing that comes out of not knowing the codebase is that you're mostly relegated to being a glorified tester.

Right now (for me) it's very frequent, depending on the type of project, but in the future it could be less frequent - but at some you've gotta test what you're rolling out. I guess you can use another AI to do that but I don't know...

Anyway, my current workflow is:

1. write detailed specs/prompt,

2. let agent loose,

3. pull down and test... usually something goes wrong.

3.1 converse with and ask agent to fix,

3.2 let agent loose again,

3.3 test again... if something goes wrong again:

3.3.1 ...

Sometimes the Agent gets lost in the fixes but now have a better idea what can go wrong and you can start over with a better initial prompt.

I haven't had a lot of success with pre-discussing (planning, PRDing) implementations, as in it worked, but not much better than directly trying to prompt what I want and takes a lot longer. But I'm not usually doing "normal" stuff as this is purely fun/exploratory side-project stuff and my asks are usually complicated but not complex if that makes sense.

I guess development is always a lot of testing, but this feels different. I click around but don't gain a lot of insight. It feels more shallow. I can write a new prompt and explain what's different but I haven't furthered my understanding much.

Also, not knowing the codebase, you might need a couple attempts at phrasing your ask just the right way. I probably had to ask my agent 5+ times, trying to explain in different ways how translate phone IMU yaw/pitch/roll into translations of the screen projection. Sometimes it's surprisingly hard to explain what you want to happen when you don't know the how it's implemented.