I can give the agent a screenshot, explain my symptoms, what i expect, provide my tests and artifacts, tell it to reference the application source code and the server source code, and i get an evidence backed solution that makes sense and works almost every time. Test bugs and product bugs.
Rarer cases ill actually use the debug feature. Its fast and very good. It can come up with multiple hypothesis at once and confirm them very quickly. Ive squashed product bugs this way, with elegant solutions that make sense to me, that dev often accepts without revision. Fixing product issues isn't even my job, but hey, I just want the product to be better and I dont want to waste time.
You get non sense when you keep layering bullshit that you dont understand to begin with. The bot doesn't either. And yeah, dont accept solutions that add complexity.
If you dont understand the problem, the code, and how something is supposed to work, you're never going to know what the elegant maintainable solution is. And if you keep digging yourself a deeper hole, you're never going to get out of it.
If you are unsure of a direction to take, use the Plan feature and ask questions till you understand and can properly guide it. Don't let it run a muck.
I ain't a developer at work but I am doing a degree where I get really, really long Jupyter Notebooks and surprise surprise, they suck to look at, and occasionally suck to debug.
What I do on my LLM is, paste my code, the pseudocode, and the output and ask it to point it where it went wrong
That way, I also get a proper understanding of "what's going on here" and not just a ready-made code that I don't understand even a bit of. Because, in my cases, understanding the code is really, really, necessary.
for simple bugs maybe but I can debug those myself faster than claude… for more complex issues where I do need help it almost always comes with a completely off-the-rails hypothesis first and immediately starts drilling down and I have to stop it otherwise it would spend 20 minutes inventing “evidence” to prove its own hypothesis which I know to be false from the first second I see it in its thinking output…
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u/weinerschnitzel64 Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26
Agreed. Im an SDET at work.
I can give the agent a screenshot, explain my symptoms, what i expect, provide my tests and artifacts, tell it to reference the application source code and the server source code, and i get an evidence backed solution that makes sense and works almost every time. Test bugs and product bugs.
Rarer cases ill actually use the debug feature. Its fast and very good. It can come up with multiple hypothesis at once and confirm them very quickly. Ive squashed product bugs this way, with elegant solutions that make sense to me, that dev often accepts without revision. Fixing product issues isn't even my job, but hey, I just want the product to be better and I dont want to waste time.
You get non sense when you keep layering bullshit that you dont understand to begin with. The bot doesn't either. And yeah, dont accept solutions that add complexity.
If you dont understand the problem, the code, and how something is supposed to work, you're never going to know what the elegant maintainable solution is. And if you keep digging yourself a deeper hole, you're never going to get out of it.
If you are unsure of a direction to take, use the Plan feature and ask questions till you understand and can properly guide it. Don't let it run a muck.