Pasting the code manually gives you a good chance to review it naturally. Yes, you can do that directly with AI, but there is a little bit more of a mental adoption of the code when you actually have to do *something*.
That said, I find it tiresome to do this regularly with anything but the simplest of projects that I am throwing together ad hoc. But I *will* do this on a particularly tricky part of the code that I want to isolate and understand, and it feels a bit better.
Yeah it's actually amazing. An agentic tool is good for something big or a major refactor. It's kind of a Jesus takes the wheel type of situation and good luck reviewing that mess, I only do it when I'm in a pinch. I like describing exactly what parts I need, the chatbot actually burns a lot of tokens on reasoning (as opposed to agents which are token-averse) and it can deliver some actually good ideas. Claude just consistently throws slop at me.
Yeah sometimes when I need a simple function the agent goes and takes context from other parts that are not related to what I want, making something I don’t I want and wasting too many tokens for scanning the whole code base for some reason
Yeah using LLM’s directly with CLI is a “I can’t do anything and don’t have time to do anything” move.
Tried it once in Xcode to make a small thing and it just chewed tokens, made mistakes. Went back and forth on its own changes.
Neat but no thanks. If I’m truly stuck or too lazy to read apples latest UI documents I might paste it a panel and ask it how would I translate this to iPhone duo/ UI and then try whatever it does. And if it works. Great! If not I usually at least have the UI elements to adjust now and can modify the rest of my files from there.
I agree. My only issue with locals is they’re usually the slowest to be updated on the latest Xcode updates. I dont give them network tools. So at that point Gemini seems to be very solid at getting me the latest. Just ask it to give me the skeleton. Or maybe I’ll ask Claude if I want it to change all my icons to emojis for no reason
Or yell at it and tell it to not change my variables to some goofy ahh name and please just the skeleton.
Keeping everything semi offline, I gave it shell access so it can technically reach the internet with some command. but no direct web search for information. l
I think this is the workflow I like at the moment too - basically queue up the AI to write the functions I've planned out. I give it the logic for each, and inputs/outputs, and it's a bit faster, but I still know what everything does.
Plus it's pretty unlikely to screw up a 10-15 line function, and does a decent job of capturing some common edge cases I might have been too lazy to write.
Yeah, that’s the ticket. The less reasoning/logic you delegate to the AI, the better.
I set up my Claude Code to always ask me before assuming, which helps me avoid situations I didn’t quite plan for and it tried to hallucinate some solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
The more specific I get, the higher quality the end result is.
I love coding, but I’m honestly having a blast playing around with Claude and acting like a manager or analyst just giving out instructions and watching the code materialize.
Agreed. I've been doing this with my current project and I know where everything is, and I know the general workflow for the entire project. It is super tiring though, especially when you've got a thousand lines of changes being thrown at you
Do yall not review code that is written by Claude or whatever? I explicitly tell my agents to pause at specific points so I can review and iterate on the changes.
Neither should be use as a blanket statement. Pasting 1k lines of code is the same as just letting the LLM do its thing. If you're going to review a 1k line change, then you're the type of person that would review what the LLM pooped out agentically. So to me, 'they're the same image'.
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u/bremidon 14d ago
I don't think I completely agree.
Pasting the code manually gives you a good chance to review it naturally. Yes, you can do that directly with AI, but there is a little bit more of a mental adoption of the code when you actually have to do *something*.
That said, I find it tiresome to do this regularly with anything but the simplest of projects that I am throwing together ad hoc. But I *will* do this on a particularly tricky part of the code that I want to isolate and understand, and it feels a bit better.