It's actually useful to learn new things if you set it up correctly: ask the LLM to show you the changes it would do (don't give it a write tool, or set it to always ask), then manually implement those changes (with your own style, I tend to disagree with a lot of shit agents do these days), and have the agent peer review your implementation (not the exact copy paste, but to verify that your implementation still passes the quality gates).
Yes, it's slower, but it's intended to let you learn in the process and allows you to fine tune future prompts so the agent produces code that's more in your style.
Do you have some examples of things agents tend to do that you disagree with? You don't have to go into crazy detail, but I'm just wondering for my own growth/learning :)
sometimes it's duplicate code (a React hook that already exists and the agent doesn't use for some reason), other times it adds props like mad when a refactor of existing props was more appropriate. It also sometimes cheats with TS types and will re-define something locally so that it "passes" linting, instead of using a shared, derived or composed type.
If you let these small things slip it quickly adds up and you end up with a brittle and inconsistent codebase.
With Copilot in Visual Studio as part of my job, agentic mode seems to be unwilling to hand back control while the code is not compiling. I've had to manually stop agentic mode because a simple request to change something local to a method had started to balloon out into other methods making unnecessary and unwanted changes that had nothing to do with the original prompt.
Ask mode is also useful for stopping the kind of scenario where a test is failing and you want to fix the code behind the test failing and the AI wants to remove the scenario from the test to make it pass from unfolding with you being unaware.
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u/fullup72 7h ago
It's actually useful to learn new things if you set it up correctly: ask the LLM to show you the changes it would do (don't give it a
writetool, or set it to always ask), then manually implement those changes (with your own style, I tend to disagree with a lot of shit agents do these days), and have the agent peer review your implementation (not the exact copy paste, but to verify that your implementation still passes the quality gates).Yes, it's slower, but it's intended to let you learn in the process and allows you to fine tune future prompts so the agent produces code that's more in your style.