[vivin]

You can't get away from the engineering part of software engineering even if you are using LLMs. I have been using Claude Opus 4.5, and it's the best out of the models I have tried. I find that I can get Claude to work well if I already know the steps I need to do beforehand, and I can get it to do all of the boring stuff. So it's a series of very focused and directed one-shot prompts that it largely gets correct, because I'm not giving it a huge task, or something open-ended.

Knowing how you would implement the solution beforehand is a huge help, because then you can just tell the LLM to do the boring/tedious bits.

[teaearlgraycold]

They’re good for getting you from A to B. But you need to know A (current state of the code) and how to get to B (desired end state). They’re fast typers not automated engineers.

[ericmcer]

seriously, I stopped agent mode altogether. I hit it with very specific like: write a function that takes an array of X and returns y.

It almost never fails and usually does it in a neat way, plus its ~50 lines of code so I can copy and paste confidently. Letting the agent just go wild on my code has always been a PITA for me.

[vivin]

I've used agent mode, but I tell it not to go hog wild and to not do anything other than what I have instructed it to do. Also, sometimes I will tell it not to change the code, and to go over its changes with me first, before I tell it that it can make the changes.

I feel the same way as you in general -- I don't trust it to go and just make changes all over the codebase. I've seen it do some really dumb stuff before because it doesn't really understand the context properly.