Comment by dluxem

I think this (for me at least) is the biggest pain point. Use styles and practices from this existing code base, even if they aren't documented explicitly in AGENTS.md or something. If we're importing a library somewhere that does what the agent is doing, reuse that same library - don't chose another one. If we have a pattern for unit tests, follow the same style. Etc. etc.

That issue, and the issue of "aesthetics", are the biggest complaints I have today. I don't know exactly how to define aesthetics, but it's when AI is making decisions that no experienced developer or designer would. They may be functionally correct but "ugly" to another developer or and end user.

An example is an case I ran in to yesterday where parsing a config, and failing and logging on a configuration error. It logged a specific item where the config was invalid but not what group or any notion of where in the config this error was. Of course, specific item names could be duplicated in different parts of the config. It's small, but correcting these minor things take time and they are the types of decisions no one would have made who had any experience writing code and debugging a config problem. This was Opus 4.8/max too.