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seba_dos1 parent
It's exactly what agentic tools make harder to do. LLM-generated code usually looks great at the first glance - your opinion on how bad it is is a function of effort spent reviewing, analyzing and questioning it.

The shitty code it comes up with helps me a lot, because fixing broken stuff and unraveling the first principles of why it's broken is how I learn best. It helps me think and stay focused. When learning new areas, the goal is to grasp the subject matter enough to find out what's wrong with the generated code - and it's still a pretty safe bet that it will be wrong, one way or another. Whenever I attempt to outsource the actual thinking (because of feeling lazy or even just to check the abilities of the model), the results are pretty bad and absolutely nowhere near the quality level of anything I'd want to sign my name under.

Of course, some people don't mind and end up wasting other people's time with their generated patches. It's not that hard to find them around. I have higher standards than replying "dunno, that's what AI wrote" when a reviewer asks why is something done this particular way. Agentic tools bring down the walls which could let you stop for a moment and notice the sloppiness of that output even further. They just let the model do more of the things it's not very good at, and encourage it to flood the code with yet another workaround for an issue that would disappear completely had you spent two minutes pondering about the root cause (which you won't do, because you don't have a mental model of what the code does, because you let the agent do it for you).


adastra22
I’m afraid this is a case of “you’re doing it wrong.”

I use Claude Code with a dozen different hand tuned subagent specs and a comprehensive CLAUDE.md specifying how to use them. I review every line of code before committing (turning off the auto commit was the very first instruction). It is now the case that it is able to make a full PR that needs no major changes. Often just one or two follow up tweak requests.

With subagents it can sometimes be running for an hour or more before it is done, but I don’t have to babysit it anymore.

seba_dos1 OP
My experiences with various models make me very suspicious of what kind of code you end up with, but if it works for your particular needs then good for you. I couldn't make it work this way for mine.

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