Same, it’s so smart but so dumb. I explain an architecture change to it and write examples of strongly typed Go code and how to store structure, it agrees and then proceeds to write some untyped string map ball of mud that has 900 specializations.

But maybe that’s on us, AI doesn’t care about all these special cases, it’s not debt to it as it will simply read them all when making changes. We’re obsessed with quality and what code is supposed to look like but those are human standards, AIs evolve to look at this complexity as a single picture, they can simply see through it so what is spaghetti code to us is merely some code to them that works as it should and is efficient. It’s interesting we can see how the two things drift apart, you would think at some point AI generated code should explode but it hold together unreasonably well in most cases…

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chradams an hour ago | parent [-]

Use hooks to run a bunch of review steps after -all- code writing steps your agent does and give it the exact review criteria you just described (via git hooks, or your agent harness of choice's own hooks eg https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks or AGENTS.md). So after every step where the agent writes the shitty untyped string map ball of mud, your orchestrator/main thread agent that spawned the code-writing-subagent spawns a follow-up review agent automatically that is given that output, your prompt that explains what well written Go code looks like, and even the sample/golden-path code of your choice to use as a style guide.

Each time you encounter a shitty thing you hate, add a new 'review type' / 'thing to watch out for' and just ask your agent to add it to your hooks for you. This works well with Claude at least.

I have about a dozen or so hooks that run on every integration branch my agents write that review for all sorts of things from correctness to spec, performance improvement opportunities, modularity, analysis of any dependencies added, 'definition of done', UI/UX, etc.

I recently told Claude it should run the whole suite of reviews twice. I will probably go on and proceed to having it run like 5 times eventually idfk.

But the more you start asking your agents to modify their own behavior, using the native solutions offered by Cursor, or Claude, or Codex, the sooner you'll start to feel better about the results.

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code_biologist an hour ago | parent [-]

I'm having bad results with SotA models. Some questions, if you're up for it:

In your workflow, who implements the review feedback - the review subagent or the code-writing-subagent?

Do have a baseline styleguide (like Google's Go style guide) for the review subagents, or is it entirely the subjective things and specific corrections? I remember 6 months ago it seemed like piling general "good taste" code advice into AGENTS.md was considered bad.

Do you move between harnesses or have you gone all in on claude? I've bounced between claude/codex/omp, maybe to my detriment.

	▲	code_biologist 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Not asking for answers to these questions, just frustration dumping: The biggest things I've struggled with are models having taste. For spec writing I was having a lot of issues with them making statements that were interpretable in a superposition of ways, eg "we'll do XYZ with entities that support and need it" when there's 3 possible entities and the model hand-waved at exactly the wrong tokens. I added AGENTS.md guidance + memories to be unambiguous (with short but good examples) and "no coined shorthand". Now I'm getting a marked increase in specificity, but it's places that don't matter (claude explaining existing code to itself). I'm having difficulty controlling the spew of new text, but feature writing/research still gets fuzzy and lazy around the difficult underspecified aspects of the problem/feature. Do I just keep dumping examples into reviewer subagent context and have them rewrite and simplify the research subagent spew? I repeatedly have "Risks and gotchas" sections have a whole paragraph dedicated to things that don't matter, and then a single sentence bullet point that's actually a huge problem when I dig into it. Do I have a generic hook to make subagents to review bullet points and size them commensurate with impact? If I tell them to "have taste", do they have taste? I'm just trying to get good code done. I hate these things.