AI writes fast, but do you know what it's breaking?
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Been shipping a lot of code lately with Cursor/Claude doing a good chunk of the actual writing. Velocity is great, but I've noticed I trust my own understanding of the codebase less than I used to - I'll touch one file and have no real sense of what else depends on it until CI (or prod) tells me.
Ended up manually tracing imports before merging anything non-trivial, just to make sure I'm not breaking something three files away.
Anyone else running into this, especially with AI-assisted code? Curious if it's a real pattern or just me being paranoid.
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WebCurate.co
Yeah, I think it's a real pattern.
AI makes writing code much faster, but understanding the whole codebase hasn't become faster in the same way. I also think tracing dependencies before merging bigger changes is worth the extra few minutes, especially when the AI wrote most of the code.
I don’t think you’re being paranoid. When AI writes most of the feature, we skip some of the slow work that normally builds our mental map of the codebase.
Before merging anything non-trivial, I’d ask the agent for a short blast-radius report: which contracts changed, what consumes them, whether any events, schemas, configs, or migrations are affected, and which tests prove the behavior still works. Then run affected tests, but use the broader suite for shared or foundational code.
Import tracing helps, but it won’t catch every behavioral dependency. Maybe the rule should be: AI can write fast, but it shouldn’t merge until it can explain what the change might break and how that was checked.
Are the failures you’re seeing mostly direct code dependencies, or quieter things like data shapes and runtime behavior?
I agree with you. AI-assisted coding definitely makes things easier and faster, but I can’t say it makes me happier as a developer. I try to keep my use of agents to a minimum and mainly use AI for support in specific parts rather than letting it handle everything. I still want to understand the code I’m writing and know how the different pieces connect.