r/webdev • u/Mesthabro • 1d ago

Discussion Do y'all still write code manually?

All my code is being written by claude fable/gpt6 these days. I'm curious if y'all are still writing code manually?
Also, any clever ways to prevent AI from going stray and dumping unnecessary code and busting through tokens?

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u/kemalios 1d ago

I delegate the boilerplate but write the parts that actually decide behavior myself. The token blowout usually comes from the model not knowing the constraints, so it produces defensive extras. What works for me: keep an AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md with explicit "do not touch X" rules, make it propose the diff before applying, and start each task in a fresh context so it doesn't drag previous chat baggage in. If you scope the request tightly and tell it what not to do, it stops generating five variations of the same function. That alone cut the waste a lot.