Make sure it know how to run the tests before it starts writing any additional code.
Then set it a clear goal.
I just asked it for a code snippet and it ended up setting up a whole repo in a docker container or something.
Even volunteered a test suite. This genuinely amazed me.
...until I checked the tests.
It was just console.log("Tests passed!")
AGI 2027
I’m terrified to attempt agentic anything in the repo my job actually cares about. I triggered it once by accident, when the agent was first rolled out and enabled by default… it broke everything. Now I just use ask mode, and even that is wrong half the time, and once it goes wrong it just keeps getting worse.
I saw a post from Dave Plumber who vibe coded up a new cross platform task manager. He said his spec document for the AI was 107 pages long. So maybe what I’m doing wrong is not giving the AI a literal novel of spec.
This sounds like programming but with extra steps that make it take longer with less reliability.
One camp already knows that Neural Nets don't work and are a dead end.
The other camp hasn't yet figured out that Neural Nets don't work, but are convinced that they do (or eventually will), because they think everything always improves over time in a linear fashion.