AI coding is a nightmare. Am I the only one experiencing this?

try using a harness. i provide one in Yaw Mode and you can copy it and modify and use a modified if you wanted to learn and tweak yours.

i use the skills /yaw-review excessively sometimes multiple times in a row on the same pr or session. followed by most often /yaw-address-all and then /yaw-coverage to add tests and /yaw-ship-ready to make production ready.

after a few rounds of these they are not needed every time on the same codebase.

if you are desperately wishing programming to go back to the before times it will never. or it will always be there but expect to be incredibly less productive than your peers.

>Why are files so bloated in the first place? Because AI prefers adding new code over modifying existing code, and it rarely deletes anything.

Did you ask it to delete stuff or consolidate functionality? Did you ask it to reuse certain available implementations? Or do you use it as a black box, letting it do all the design and code, and not caring to steer it, except with some high level request ("build x")?

If it's the latter, if we treat a (non-actually-intelligent, generative) AI as a hands-off developer and remove ourselves from the loop, we get exactly what you mention in the rant.

But nothing forces us to use it like this (except the craze of "vibe coding"). Use it as a carefully monitored and steered coding assistant.

It's slower that way? That slowness is a requirement to ingest the expertise/knowledge/taste of a human developer in the mix. It's what avoids an avalance of slop to be commited and become part of the codebase unchecked.

That's why all the focus on maximazing speed, and removing the humans from the loop, are misguided.

When LLMs are ready to removed humans from the loop, we'll know: we'd be out of a job. As long as we have one, our role is to act as a quality bottlenect, not to open the floodgates.

I haven't tried this model. We have a corporate plan for several models, and they are liberal with our spend, because we're always in an arms race with our competitors in our industry. So any advantage we can get, we need to take, or we lose edge/market share.

We have access to anthropic models, openai models and google models.

I run all my sessions on their best models with max thinking, because I don't care to optimise token usage at this stage. We are still learning every day about how to optimise our workflows, but I will say that I don't typically experience what you're describing.

I have very opinionated AGENTS.md files at the repo level, and at various other levels in the repo where more specialised rules are needed but I don't want those in my context unless that specific section of the codebase is going to be used or touched. I make a lot of use of skills. And my sessions are almost all "spec driven" in the sense that I type out an opinionated requirement to the LLM, tell it to challenge my thinking, to push back, to iterate on its own thinking, then to formulate a plan, then once done, go over it again to find any issues. I will then review the plan, or wing it, depending on the task. I then look at the overall code structure and design it has done. I have strong, opinionated coding rules in my AGENTS file. I have strong testing requirements (mostly end-to-end, not unit style).

I get really good results from this. But, I will say we're working in a highly opinionated codebase. We have the fundamentals in place already, where there are rules for how you do everything. The agent follows those rules pretty well. I'm not sure how well it would work on a codebase that is messy with a lot of conflicting design principles.

if you want to try minimax m3 with a lot of optimizations and a custom tui check out typed. and for that harness you can use it in yaw mode.

you can also use within claude code tui by running: typed cli off

i should probably change that to typed tui off/on. anyway.

I have to say the LLMs probably can do a lot of these things properly if you had access to the entire infrastructure for a single project but as you said, it is simply not economical to use. I'd rather have people maintain systems before lock in happens and someone hikes the prices and rug pulls me. In almost all cases you need someone experienced anyway to sign off on the changes it makes or to keep guidelines and guardrails intact.

I don't believe the "you are holding it wrong", "works on my machine", "works on this model" or "do this spec structure" type of arguments to compensate the fundamental issues. The tech simply does not do what is advertised and claimed as it is.