Comment by soiltype
12 hours ago
Personally I've found "carefully review every move it makes" to be an extremely unpleasant and difficult workflow. The effort needed to parse every action is immense, but there's a complete absence of creative engagement - no chance of flow state. Just the worst kind of work which I've been unable to sustain, unfortunately. At this point I mostly still do work by hand.
It's unpleasant for me at normal speed settings, but on fast mode it works really well: the AI does changes quickly enough for me to stay focused.
Of course this requires being fortunate enough that you have one of those AI positive employers where you can spend lots of money on clankers.
I don't review every move it makes, I rather have a workflow where I first ask it questions about the code, and it looks around and explores various design choices. then i nudge it towards the design choice I think is best, etc. That asking around about the code also loads up the context in the appropriate manner so that the AI knows how to do the change well.
It's a me in the loop workflow but that prevents a lot of bugs, makes me aware of the design choices, and thanks to fast mode, it is more pleasant and much faster than me manually doing it.
This is my biggest problem with the promises of agentic coding (well, there are an awful lot of problems, but this is the biggest one from an immediate practical perspective).
One the one hand, reviewing and micromaning everything it does is tedious and unrewarding. Unlike reviewing a colleague's code, you're never going to teach it anything; maybe you'll get some skills out of it if you finds something that comes up often enough it's worth writing a skill for. And this only gets you, at best, a slight speedup over writing it yourself, as you have to stay engaged and think about everything that's going on.
Or you can just let it grind away agentically and only test the final output. This allows you to get those huge gains at first, but it can easily just start accumulating more and more cruft and bad design decisions and hacks on top of hacks. And you increasingly don't know what it's doing or why, you're losing the skill of even being able to because you're not exercising it.
You're just building yourself a huge pile of technical debt. You might delete your prod database without realizing it. You might end up with an auth system that doesn't actually check the auth and so someone can just set a username of an admin in a cookie to log in. Or whatever; you have no idea, and even if the model gets it right 95% of the time, do you want to be periodically rolling a d20 and if you get a 1 you lose everything?
I agree, but I also think that giving the LLM free rein is also extremely unpleasant and difficult. And you still need to review the resulting code.
I don't think there's anything difficult or unpleasant about the process of letting the LLM run free, that's the whole point, it's nearly frictionless. Which includes not reviewing the code carefully. You say "need" but you mean "ought".
Friction is not the only source of displeasure. I've tried out vibe-coding for something non-trivial; I found it deeply unpleasant.
Reviewing isn't hard when the diff is what you asked for. It's when you asked for a one-line fix and get back 40 changed lines across four files. At that point you're not even reviewing your change anymore, you're auditing theirs.