Control the Ideas, Not the Code

I'm not telling him to stop writing on his own and instead just let AI write for him, but there's no shame in letting an NLP tool do what it's made for and correct the mistakes you made writing in a language you aren't native to.

How much of the source code of the compiler you use did you read? How much of the source code of the standard library of your chosen language did you read? What about the dependencies?

How much of the source code of a huge codebase does the average developer read? I don't think any human alive has read the majority of code in huge codebases like Word, Windows, Linux, etc.

For almost every developer, the majority of the code you use every day, whether in software you use or actual code you're shipping, is not code you've ever read. And no one seems to have a problem with it, because we've built lots of processes around this. It's only when the code is written by an AI and not a coworker or random library author that people seem to have a problem.

And I get it! AI wasn't very good at writing code two years ago. Maybe even a year ago. I think it's good now, but maybe you don't - ok, that's fine, maybe it'll only live up to your standards in a year or two or ten. But that doesn't seem to be what people are arguing, it's not "AI isn't good enough", it's "how can we possibly ship code we never read", and my point is that we've all been doing this for our entire careers.

I still read the code; but I work to make a trustworthy agent, so I can skim read at review.

For a year+ I've been gaining leverage by codifying guardrails. Insanely intricate (and fun to create) lint scripts that catch things like python imports inside functions instead of the top of the file, or dumb use of dict return where the return should be a pydantic model, or the agent dumbly using the ugly default Tailwind color classes instead of my design system colors.

It's fun codifying "how we work around here" and it's been great for keeping dumb AI mistakes off my radar.

Last week I busted out my text editor and typed (typed!) a section into CLAUDE.md on my philosophy - my why. "We do test driven development because we have a computer that can instantly validate your code." "We don't modify code until we have created and witnessed some other thing that durably proves the need for our change." Etc. etc.

Well the agent leveled up suddenly and dramatically. It was a real mind opener. One of those banger realizations. I'd been leaving tons of power on the table.

When backfilling tests, it suddenly started mutating production code and rerunning to witness tests go red - something it calls "teeth". It doesn't just assume tests work and move on! I didn't ask for that, it was latent in the model. I no longer have to remind it to run new eslint rules first to prove they're correct. Sometimes it even proposes new lint rules and checks to tighten its guardrails.

What I learned that maps to what @antirez is saying:

With everything about agents, stop operating at a level of "what". The what is the agent's job.

Stop operating at a level of "how" too!

Just focus on not hoarding your "why". Tell your agent where your ideas come from, why they matter. Do not just think the why in your head. Write it down! Put it in CLAUDE.md. Offload it into the system!

Your tools will level up.

Even if it's not about the harness. Building product features? Tell it what you think the users will do. And why. It might codify the UX closer to how you'd have. Tell it what other UIs you've seen and like - it probably knows about them and can just code that - less detail needed.

And it'll bring the code closer to what you'd have written. And bring you closer to that holy grail, LGTM skim-review.