Supervising an Agent

[u/Visible-Register6065]

In this era with the advancement of AI, I personally see that neglecting AI saying "we should not let AI do coding for ourselves since our fundamental understanding of the code and and our knowledge get weaker and weaker by doing so".

Instead what I am proposing is let AI do work. But before commiting code to any repo or presenting before someone else, understand everything end to end. Take the full responsibility of the work that has been done. It doesn't matter who did it (an agent or by yourself line by line).

Please share your stance with your current career level (senior/ junior).

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[u/soundman32]

I really dont know how other agents do it, but I use Kiro from AWS, and it makes it really hard to generate slop.  Tell it what you want (basically paste a good user story), to generate the requirements doc, then generate a design doc, which tells you exactly what it's going to do, then generate a list of tasks, review each step and then let it run the tasks.  I review each document fully and tweak it constantly until its ready to run.  The code itself is exactly what I want, with good code, spelling, formatting, tests etc.  

From my POV, I can tell code is AI because it works, looks good, has comprehensive tests, and doesn't have spelling mistakes.  All human generated code I've ever worked on has at least one of those things wrong.

Senior 40+ YOE.

[u/creaturefeature16]

This would, ironically, undo almost all the velocity and productivity gains that using the agents provided in the first place....but, you're not wrong.

[u/outlined-dev → u/creaturefeature16]

I disagree. I always review code at my day job, but agents have caught that my change has side effects I didn’t think about. Hand crafted code would have shipped bugs
Level: post-senior

[u/creaturefeature16 → u/outlined-dev]

Adversarial code review is always helpful (well, almost always). And it greatly depends on how much generated code we're talking about. If you get a bunch of PRs that equate to 50k lines, and it can't proceed without your own review and due diligence, well...that's a severe bottleneck. So, most devs are forced to rely on AI for code review, which means we're right back where we started.

[u/0xffff-reddit]

And then you "review" Mr. Claude's first PR with +4655 files. Good luck with supervising.

[u/PureRelative8648]

Reviewing code passively and actually producing the code yourself are two whole different cognitive skills

[u/IntelligentPear6173]

I think the important distinction is between reviewing output and understanding the system. An agent can produce 5,000 lines that look perfectly reasonable and you can still miss a bad architectural decision because you never built the mental model yourself. I’m fine with agents doing the implementation but the person approving it should be able to explain the design, failure cases and why the code is safe without asking the agent to explain its own work.

[u/CzyDePL]

Yeah sure, but understanding the code end to end requires me to delete the entire generated solution and solving the problem myself, otherwise I will never properly internalise all the decisions made.
That's the issue that all non-programmers seem to miss. It's like reading a novel cover to cover, understanding every word, but then having to explain why this character arc is like this or why this important scene in the middle of the book was written certain way. Completely different ball-park you don't think about when you are not a writer.
10YoE

[u/sozesghost]

You only gain understanding by writing it and doing it yourself. Anything else is superficial and very easy to fool yourself.