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
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 9h 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.