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Comment by lukaslalinsky | Hacker News Reader

How can you end up with code you don't understand, if you review anything it writes? I wouldn't let it deviate from the architecture I want to have for the project. I had problems with junior devs in the past, too eager to change a project, and I couldn't really tell them to stop (need to work on my communication skills). No such problem with Claude Code.

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I don’t remember what architecture was used by PRs I reviewed a month ago. I remember what architecture I designed 15 years ago for projects I was part of.

I've only used the agentic tools a bit, but I've found that they're able to generate code at a velocity that I struggle to keep in my head. The development loop also doesn't require me to interact with the code as much, so I have worse retention of things like which functions are in which file, what helper functions already exist, etc.

It's less that I can't understand, and more that my context on the code is very weak.

Ask it to document the code with design documents and mermaid diagrams. Much faster to review.

I might have to try this. Without having tried it, it feels like the context I think I lack is more nitty gritty than would be exposed like this. It's not like I'm unsure of how a request ends up in a database transaction, but more "do we need or already have an abstraction over paging in database queries?". It doesn't feel like mermaid diagrams or design documents would include that, but I'm open to being wrong there.

If you have a question like that, just ask.

So youre telling me that reading is the same as writing? In terms of the brain actually consuming and processing the info you gave it and storing it

> a mishmash of vibe coded stuff you don’t understand.

No, there is a difference between "I wrote this code" and "I understand this code". You don't need to write all the code in a project to understand it. Otherwise writing software in a team would not be a viable undertaking.

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