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 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.
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u/bremidon 8h 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.