Comment by jaggederest

Direct feedback:

You have to give up on style. "not how I'd write things" is not a blocker. Defiance of instructions is normal, you just have to steer it and correct. There's no substitute for diligence yet.

80/20 - this means your scope was too large, split the scope or tell the agent to revert, split the scope, and try again.

RE and assembler: it's really good at this stuff. It can patch almost any binary with the right tools

Swift: you have to give it tool usage in whatever result you're wanting. If it's a macos app, you have to let the LLM pilot it to get feedback, or build an extensive end to end test suite that it can drive autonomously. If you get into the loop on changes it'll feel awful and like no time savings. Review at the level of using the app and looking at the code, not in process or reviewing every tool call or diff.

applescript: works great, I have a bunch of automation set up this way, what problems are you seeing?

elisp: tough language, llms kinda hate parentheses unless you're really tight on the linting, and elisp is enough of its own animal that the training for e.g. common lisp isn't great.

python: will suck unless you enable all the typechecking, make it use bdd, and have a linter/formatter run precommit and yell at the robot for you.

Web vs cli: you should use the cli 100% because it lets you change the environment, if you're getting better results on web, you haven't set your local environment up very well. My personal preference is to run my own dev server on aws but that's spendy.