How do you decide what to let Claude Code fully own vs. review line by line?
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Solo builder here, using Cursor + Claude Code as basically my whole engineering team. Six months in I still don't have a good instinct for this: some days I let it just run with a whole feature and barely glance at the diff, other days I'm rereading every line like it's a junior dev's first PR.
Right now my rough rule is billing/auth code gets the paranoid review, UI and analytics panels get the "looks fine, ship it" treatment. But that's just a gut feeling, not a real system.
Anyone here have an actual framework for this, or is everyone just winging it based on vibes and how burned they've been before?
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@moddy what type of code do you always reviews before merging?
how did you decide which tasks Claude Code can handle independently?
Honestly just trial and error early on. Let it fully own something low stakes, watched what broke, adjusted from there. The billing/auth vs UI split came out of getting burned once on something billing-adjacent, not from planning it ahead of time
do you review AI generated code differently from human written code?
Yeah, honestly more skeptical of it in a specific way. Human code that's wrong usually looks unfinished or sketchy. AI code that's wrong often looks totally confident and clean, so I've had to train myself to not let tidy code fool me into skipping the review.
@moddy which parts of your product do you never let AI fully own?
@moddy what's your biggest concern when letting AI write large features?
@isaacjosepkq6w That it makes a decision three files away from where I'm looking that quietly conflicts with something else in the app, and it all still compiles fine. Small tasks that's rare. Big features, way more surface area for that to happen unnoticed.
@moddy what was your biggest lesson from using AI as a coding partner?
I seperate tasks into low medium and high risk before letting Claude Code finish them. Would adding automated tests make reviewing critical changes much easier for solo builders?
@darly_selby Probably, and honestly that's the gap in my setup right now. I don't have real test coverage on the billing stuff, I just review it carefully by hand every time, which doesn't scale great. Something I know I should fix.
i would let Claude Code own repetitive changes after strong automated checks pass but always inspect anything affecting users or data. Does keeping a simple review matrix help make each shipping decision more consistent?
@donna_gerrard Would probably help me a lot, I don't have one written down anywhere, it's all just in my head right now which isn't great for consistency.
I follow a similar approach. Anything that touches payments, authentication, or data gets a careful review, while UI tweaks are usually much easier to trust.
Me relying on tests before reading every line has saved plenty of time without lowering quality. Could combining test coverage with feature risk create a repeatable process instead of depending on daily instincts?