zlacker

> Here’s the thing: I don’t read code anymore. I used to write code and read code. Now when something isn’t working, I don’t go look at the code.

Recently I picked a smallish task from our backlog. This is some code I'm not familiar with, frontend stuff I wouldn't tackle normally.

Claude wrote something. I tested, it didn't work. I explained the issue. It added a bunch of traces, asked me to collect the logs, figured out a fix, submitted the change.

Got bunch of linter errors that I don't understand, and that I copied and pasted to Claude. It fixed something, but still got lint errors, which Claude dismissed as irrelevant, but I realized I wasn't happy with the new behavior.

After 3 days of iteration, my change seems ok, passed the CI, the linters, and automatic review.

At that stage, I have no idea if this is the right way to fix the problem, and if it breaks something, I won't be able to fix it myself as I'm clueless. Also, it could be that a human reviewer tells me it's totally wrong, or ask me questions I won't be able to answer.

Not only, this process wasn't fun at all, but I also didn't learn anything, and I may introduce technical debt which AI may not be able to fix.

I agree that coding agents can boost efficiency in some cases, but I don't see a shift left of IDEs at that stage.

>>yodsan+(OP)
Why not look at the code? If you see something that looks messy, ask for it to be cleaned up.

Code health is a choice. We have power tools now. All you have to do is ask.

>>yodsan+(OP)
My rule is 3 tries then dig deeper. Sometimes I don't even wait that long, certain classes of bugs are easy for humans to detect but hard for agents, such as CSS issues. Try asking the agent to explain/summarize the code that's causing the problem and double checking against docs for the version you're using, that solves a lot of problems.

>>skybri+g4
a simple this seems odd / messy / un-pythonic is often enough

>>yodsan+(OP)
This has largely been my experience. Just reading and understanding the code, and writing the change myself ends up actually being faster.

>>yodsan+(OP)
> This is some code I'm not familiar with

Ask it to analyze and explain the code to you.