I am currently writing a lot of code that I am not reviewing anymore. These are all the things that make it work for me:

- Work on small projects (< 500k lines of code).

- Work for business people who want fast results. Agentic coding gets you to something presentable much faster at the cost of code quality. I have never seen a customer or business person care about that.

- Have clearly defined API boundaries. Examples: If the back end is solid you can just vibe code the first version of a front end according to some mockup. Define a data pipeline with steps and clear contracts of what data gets passed around and what each step does. If the LLM messes up one step, rip it out and rewrite it.

- Have clearly set up workflows for tasks. Start with a "ask me everything" phase, then comes a plan phase, a review phase, an implementation phase, another review phase and then the integration phase. Multiple agents going over the same problem catch a surprising amount of dumb stuff that would otherwise slip through.

- Set up excellent testing. Build your whole architecture around being easy to test.

- Have skills for common problems. For one of my projects I had to set up a skill on how to query the ORM, because Claude was consistently doing database operations in a for loop, where it could use batch operations.

The code in the end is better than a lot of the code I've seen humans write.

I don't think this works for everybody and every project. If you have a culture that values code quality and readability, if you work on large existing projects, if you have to nail the architecture of some non-trivial piece of software etc. you are going to have a bad time.

On the other hand you can probably build the MVP of your AI-supported CRUD app 10-20x faster.

I think a lot of the discussions around development tools and techniques just stem from two facts:

1. Developers work on widely different projects with different management and constraints.

2. Tools, libraries, frameworks and code style have to match your mental model, otherwise you going to dislike them.

>> but I look at those same people’s code and it’s horrific, and then I find they haven’t made it far past a proof of concept phase.

> Work on small projects (< 500k lines of code).

> Work for business people who want fast results. Agentic coding gets you to something presentable much faster at the cost of code quality.

You then expand on methods and processes that work for you, but I think the crucial question that you do not answer is: How long lived are any of these codebases?

> Work for business people who want fast results. Agentic coding gets you to something presentable much faster at the cost of code quality. I have never seen a customer or business person care about that.

That's always false. It's like people want their meals delivered fast. They say they don't care about taste or how it is done. Watch when they get sick or don't like it and the drama that happens.

People don't care until they do. They don't know what to care (in this case code quality) or say that because you're not explaining it. People also "gamble" and you take the blame. Long term impacts? Nah doesn't matter. Weeks later and things break -- what did you do?