alt Hacker NewsAsk the AI how it works!
It's totally fair to load up some open source project into an agentic IDE and instead of asking it to write something ask questions like "how does X happen when I use feature Y?" or "can you explain how client code could accomplish Z"
All the time I see an AI use a language feature or library feature that I never used before or I see some code I don't understand and it does much better than a lot of humans do at explaining what it did.
You certainly can do this for code, and it’ll give you great answers. But I find that, for whatever reason, info that I consume this way has a much shorter TTL in my brain than something I wrote myself.
I’ve been experimenting with writing a living spec — API endpoints, schemas, how things work at a low enough level that the LLM can fill in the details - and that’s been working well.
It also forces me to do the hammock-driven development necessary to build the right thing, and as a byproduct it keeps the design in my head longer.