Comment by CuriouslyC
9 hours ago
Do you tell AI the patterns/tools/architecture you want? Telling agents to "build me XYZ, make it gud!" is likely to precede a mess, telling it to build a modular monolith using your library/tool list, your preferred folder structure, other patterns/algorithms you use, etc will end you up with something that might have some minor style issues or not be perfectly canonical, but will be approximately correct within a reasonable margin, or is within 1-2 turns of being so.
You have to let go of the code looking exactly a certain way, but having code _work_ a certain way at a coarse level is doable and fairly easy.
Honestly, even this isn't really true anymore. With Opus 4.5 and 5.2 Codex in tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex CLI, "just do the thing" is a viable strategy for a shockingly large category of tasks.
Just do the thing can produce functional code, but even with Opus4.5/Codex5.2, there are still plenty of moments where the way it decides to do something is cringe.
>You have to let go of the code looking exactly a certain way, but having code _work_ a certain way at a coarse level is doable and fairly easy.
So all that bullshit about "code smells" was nonsense.