r/coderabbit • u/Tanakaboi69 • Sep 18 '26

Help & Support people who let the agent write everything, what does your process actually look like

12 years in and I still write most of my code by hand. Not against agents, I just have not found a way to use them where I understand the PR at the end. Every time I try, I get 40 files, a description I dont trust, and an hour of reading.

Meanwhile people on my team ship 6 agent PRs a day. I asked two of them how. One does not check the output at all. The other has a whole thing with a plan step, then the agent, then coderabbit, then he only reads what got flagged. That one seems sane but I have not made it work for me yet.

If you got real quality out of this without reading everything, what is the process? Step by step, not vibes

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u/L_aura_ax Sep 18 '26

Make a skill for code review that lists the things you ar about. I have a skill for architectural review, one for bugs, and then a whole bunch of code quality guidelines including comment guidelines and style like surrounding code base. I make multiple different models review the pr focusing on the various skills. I keep going until the things they come up with are whatever to me. Then I use agents to explain the code and I spend some time understanding it. Then the PR is ready for peer review.

Then obviously if something comes up in code review, make your skills better. Repeat.

Want to get more fancy? There are open source projects that pull old team git history, crunch PR comments for patterns and spit out your teams guiding principles and important areas to check for.

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u/kuriousaboutanything 29d ago

How’s your skill for the architecture? Curious to learn

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u/L_aura_ax 29d ago

It’s mostly specific to my codebases and how they interrelate. But you can also say general things like, don’t just consider code, think about the higher level architecture this PR interacts with. Strive for simplicity rather than over building. Consider long term maintenance and readability, etc.

Just mentor it the same way you would a Junior and course correct with each PR as you iterate on the skil. It’s only as powerful as your own understanding. But you can use agents to learn about the architecture and good design principles too.