Comment by eloisius
1 month ago
It doesn’t contain any information at all about the structure of the JSON output. Is this a greenfield endpoint and anything will work is does it need to conform to an existing API? What about response codes for different failure modes? What about logging?
Your comment exemplifies what a lot of people complain about vibe coding: it works great for greenfielding CRUD apps, but it’s a bitch to use in a real code base.
If it's not a greenfield project, the Agent will go and look at the other endpoints and mimic the style as much as possible. Just like a human would.
"But we have documentati..." then give the Agent access to the same docs as humans and it'll use them.
On a real codebase there’s going to be v5 that is the newest version, v4 that we planned to migrate off of but we had to keep around for iOS clients, and v3 that no one except for a dozen huge enterprise customers use. But we need to support all 3 styles. This stuff is sort of documented, but not completely, and there’s a push by some people in the org to use v5 style for every new feature, but there’s one director pushing back on that. So you need to go talk to a few people and get enough condensed to CYA before deciding what to do.
Some version of that happens in every big company or every long running app. Claude isn’t AGI and that prompt isn’t nearly specific enough for anything outside of greenfield.
AI can't fix shit processes =)
I actually believe it just surfaces them, humans will tolerate ambiguity like that and deal with it. AI Agents either won't work properly or will just fail to do anything useful.
1 reply →