Comment by shepherdjerred
10 hours ago
IMO this points to two things:
- You didn't have the agent plan and de-risk/experiment beforehand
- You didn't glance at the output
Working with agents is not very different from working with other engineers.
You write a design doc, share it with others, divvy up the work. You get to review some % of the code and make sure the implementation is reasonable. You leave comments for the important issues rather than trying to obtain pure/perfect code.
One of the biggest difference IMO is that you cannot really mentor an agent (other than prompting e.g. with AGENTS.md/skills)
Agents, just like engineers, can create needlessly complex code/systems. If you want a good result, you need to ask why did they do it X way and consider alternatives.
True, I didn’t do those in detail. I vaguely looked at the output and thought “let’s see if that works at all”.
I do such more careful planning and AI handholding at work where it’s important the thing doesn’t break in prod, or doesn’t forget about some important use case.
But this was just purely for “fun” / homelab style type of vibe coding where I don’t want it to feel like work and write intricate specs and handhold the agent - point being the current SotA models still currently do need a bunch of guidance to not devolve into a code spaghetti, and it does end up feeling like ‘work’.
This is an extremely good advice - thank you