allisonmaybe i'm just not good enough of a programmer to use coding agents, i guess? i definitely don't trust my ability to know whether or not some code will do what i want it to do just by looking at it
Nelson Minar@aparrish I don't even look at the code the agents write, or at least not much. It works better for things that you can build good test suites for or where you care more about the output of the program than the way the program works. See also @simon's book on agentic programming.
@nelson i don't trust my tests to be correct either, only that they reflect my best understanding. and i'm not sure what it could mean to care more about the output of a program than how the program works...? isn't the output of a program *determined by* how the program works? i feel like whenever i've believed there was a difference between those two things, i ended up being wrong (sometimes subtly, sometimes not)
@aparrish I use Claude Code for a lot of one-offs and non-critical projects. Ie, my little thread unroller for travel postcards. The standard of quality here is
This is not a high stakes or subtle program I'm working on! For something more complex like a Fediverse server, there's way more hidden and subtle than I'd trust to an agent. People are doing that kind of work with AI too but I don't.