alt Hacker NewsFor me the solution has been to throw away the code I don’t understand. I let the agent write the code, and if when I read it it seems unclear or needs a lot of explanation from the agent, I just throw it away and start over, or do it by myself.
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Something funny happens when you reject code. The agent realises it is garbage.
I'm personally of the opinion that the tools for reviewing LLM generated code are awful. 99% of the time I want to do line by line comments and tell it everything it did wrong. Given that information, the next iteration would be much more up to my standards.
The same also applies to other people's LLM generated code. Yeah sure they can just pass on the comments to the LLM, but that will just mean more iterations and them losing their job.
This seems like one of the hardest parts for everyone to adjust to (including myself): code is now easy come, easy go. Or in other words, everyone seems to get trapped in the sunk cost fallacy, even if there's not even that much sunk cost any more!
This is where I’m at as well. If it needs to change too much to do what I want, I take that as a sign to either (1) ask for a change that is easier to review, or barring that (2) pivot to refactoring the codebase until it becomes a change that is easy to review.
Ironically, even in this era of cheap and instant code, what works best (for me) is still to write as little code as possible.