Do you actually read the code your AI agent writes, or just skim the diff and move on?
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honest self-assessment time. when an agent finishes a task and shows you a diff, what actually happens?
for me it depends entirely on the size. under ~30 lines I read every line. past that I mostly skim for anything that touches auth, payments, or migrations and trust the rest if tests pass. I know that's not a great policy, it's just the realistic one given how much code moves through these sessions in a day.
curious where everyone else draws the line. is there a file size or file type where you always stop and read carefully no matter how rushed you are? and has skipping the read ever actually bitten you, or has it been fine so far?
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the one that's bitten me is migrations, but not in the way you'd expect - it wasn't a bad migration, it was a fine migration that silently dropped a default value on a column nobody flagged because the diff was 200 lines of "routine" schema changes and I skimmed past it. now my rule is less about line count and more about blast radius: anything that touches a schema or a payment path gets read regardless of size, even if it's one line. everything else I trust tests for. the uncomfortable truth is size is a bad proxy for risk, a one-line change to a migration is scarier than a 300-line new UI component.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
I do not know how to code properly, and first I wanted to write code for my plugin, but even after multiple attempts across several days, it didn't work properly (I think that I clearly described the features I wanted).
Since I didn't know which part to fix, I decided to use AI to teach me the code so I can overview what I am doing and understand it.
But if I were an experienced programmer, I would just ask AI where the particular parts in the code are responsible for the feature, and I could change them later. Once the man has the knowledge, everything is easier :)
I've been programming about 10 years now, so I just have a habit of wanting to know what the LLM has produced.
I at least skim the code unless it's something trivial.
And for larger pieces of code I ask the LLM to audit and review it and I analyse the review output.
It's definitely easy to get comfortable especially as these models get better and better but knowing how to code is a valuable skill to have.