This mindset is fine (it's mine essentially too).
But it absolutely has to be combined with verification/testing at the same speed as code production.
But it absolutely has to be combined with verification/testing at the same speed as code production.
reminds me of the experience of reading a math text without doing the exercises, thinking that you've understood the material, and then falling flat on your face when you attempt to apply your "understanding" to a novel problem. there's a significant difference between passively reading something and really putting active effort into it. only the latter leads to actual understanding ime
On the other hand, LLM-generated code comments better than I do, so given a long enough time horizon, it could be more understandable at a later time than code I've written myself (we've all had the experience of forgetting how things work).
> On the other hand, LLM-generated code comments better than I do, so given a long enough time horizon, it could be more understandable at a later time than code I've written myself (we've all had the experience of forgetting how things work).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
You ask questions about code when you implement something and if you cannot answer these questions, you go to code to find answers out and refresh your understanding of it.
For this to work you have to be interested in the understanding of the code and code should be created at the pace you can keep up.
Software engineers usually do create code economically because they need to remember and understand it. Vibe coders do not have this particular constraint, they just do not aim for most understandable code possible. Even if there are more comments in code.
However, this comes at the cost of losing track of the minute details of the implementation because you didn't write it yourself. I find it a bit analogous to code I've reviewed vs code I've written.
However, I've found using AI for code structure summary and questioning tends to be a good way to get around it. I might forget faster, but I also pick it up faster.
Then, after it says, yes I'm sure this is production ready and we're good to move on, you have Codex and Gemini both review it one last time, and ask it to address their feedback if it's valuable or not.
After all this, it's the only time I'll look at the code and review it and make sure it's coherent.
Until then, I assume it's garbage.
I'd estimate this still improves velocity by 10x, and more importantly, allows me to operate at a pace I couldn't without burning out.
You're just getting less work done on a slower cadence and asking the questions in design review and in code reviews...
i don't mind managing people, but i don't want to manage machines unless i can control them with the precise languages that the commandline and programming languages use. prompting a LLM is to vague an interface for me, the outcome is to unreliable, to unpredictable.