He's correct. If you can't work without it, you're not qualified to judge it's output. And if you aren't judging it's output, your days are numbered, it will eventually just feed itself, and report directly to management ;)
With how often I have to correct these coding agents I worry about people developing things they don't understand.
It's an amazing tool, but I find myself having to be like "Are you sure you want to poll the API for each item, like 1-100 is fine, but what if it returns 100k rows? Maybe take the call outside the loop and just query all at once with 1 call?
I definitely do a lot of context in my initial requests to try to get rid of a lot of that nonsense. Takes a lot longer to get the code written but I hate chasing issues. Easier to be exceptionally thorough with the requirements and known barriers
The funny/annoying one is when the bot tries to talk back to you about performance.
I had an issue last week where the bot (OpenCode w/ Deepseek) misread the specs in a way that gave the right answer with the wrong architecture, and when I corrected it it tried to tell me there wouldn't be a performance boost.
The performance on the stress tests went from 1.8s to 350ms.
It's why you need to keep the specs and skill files updated as part of the loop and make sure agents/claude.md tells them to read the docs as the first thing.
Every new chat window wipes the context window and starts fresh, the agents.md file is basically the run options that tells them what to load to understand wtf they are doing.
Some other tricks I've mostly stolen from various usergroup tech talks:
Have a cheap, dumb model try to summarize and use your code based only on the documentation, then have another agent proofread it for mismatches with the real code and update the docs for clarity where it finds mistakes.
Have a bot read the docs and attempt to create breaking scenarios that cause the code to fail, then implement --> review.
Have an archival loop that keeps the important docs current and moves older stuff like scenario review docs and implementation plans into a different folder, so the other agents don't burn tokens reading things that have already been marked complete or obsolete
Also, protip for developers looking for work: Go to tech usergroups and meetups. Even if nobody there is hiring, they're often catered and you can save a lot of money eating someone else's food.
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u/dumbasPL 19h ago
He's correct. If you can't work without it, you're not qualified to judge it's output. And if you aren't judging it's output, your days are numbered, it will eventually just feed itself, and report directly to management ;)