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In my experience it's really good at making you feel that you understand things.

Then when you actually dig into the code, there are many things that are not like you'd expect.

When you've experienced that a few times, you stop trusting that the agent gives you the full picture - for good reason.

When I review AI generated code I generally find so many flaws that it makes it hard for me to believe that those who are not reviewing their output are not just fooling themselves. Maybe not all the time, but quite often.

One such recent example was an SSO simulator for a local env. Instead of using a cookie to remember who was logged in, the agent remembered the last log in a variable, assuming the the next requests would come from that login.

This snowballed into our tests, where later agents had created helper tools for working around the SSO simulators statefulness.

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Never trust a single session.

Things improve drastically however if you spin up a second session and ask it to adversarially review everything that the first session produces (this goes for everything: not just code, but also design, planning, and explanations).

This works even better if you use models from different families to do so.

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Problem is where to stop. Open a 3rd session? Are you sure the 4th iteration is mostly correct? Let’s try a fifth now…
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I have, on a lark, reached 20 to 30 adversarial sessions a few times. For some tasks, the sessions will just never converge on anything that yet another session won't find fault with, recommending an alternative already ruled out by another session. Even if all the reasoning in between was documented, the new sessions will endlessly claim to find flaws in past reasoning.
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My experience is this is great when the model surfaces something to you. But I'm constantly caught off-guard by things the model didn't volunteer, things I would have quickly stumbled upon if I was working on code the traditional way. The model didn't think it was relevant but I sure do.
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In my experience having the agent explain the code doesn’t work very well for real world apps, even the parts written by humans. For example we tried using to generate diagrams, class hierarchies, etc as part of documentation. If you don’t know the code it looks great. If you do, it’s focusing on all the wrong things, missing the mental model, and ignoring lots of important bits. And Claude tends to be extremely verbose to the point of muddling things.
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