Comment by moezd

I was working on a project where the code was erroring hard, inconsistent, immensely bloated and probably written by a bit of 2023 era AI assistance. It didn't have a lot of tests, too. I had no intention to be a garbage man on that specific project, and yet fates had their own plans for me.

So I immediately went for the package.json, attached whatever test commands that could be done, then wrote some hand holding markdowns for the agents to consume. First I let it explore the codebase and take notes, then I asked for a different approach to implement, which essentially turned that "paint the sides and ship" project to a full rewrite. But guess what? All features, one by one, were implemented and extensively tested by AI. I tested all outputs myself, especially when agent got impatient and thought something was wrong in the shell env, and after a few PRs, I started to read less and only skimmed the results to see if the code "feels like it belongs with the rest". Bloat was reduced by about 25% and now all features look like they were created by a rather competent offshore software shop. Not bad, since I was also juggling a couple more projects and involvements at the same time which would've led me to certain burnout.