Re:Scaling LLMs to Larger Codebases
by teaearlgraycold on Monday December 22, 2025 @12:09PM
(#46356049)
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.
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.
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.
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.