Comment by danieldk

3 days ago

So a really difficult skill in my mind is continually avoiding temptation to vibe.

I agree. I have found that I can use agents most effectively by letting it write code in small steps. After each step I do review of the changes and polish it up (either by doing the fixups myself or prompting). I have found that this helps me understanding the code, but also avoids that the model gets in a bad solution space or produces unmaintainable code.

I also think this kind of close-loop is necessary. Like yesterday I let an LLM write a relatively complex data structure. It got the implementation nearly correct, but was stuck, unable to find an off-by-one comparison. In this case it was easy to catch because I let it write property-based tests (which I had to fix up to work properly), but it's easy for things to slip through the cracks if you don't review carefully.