Re:You'll need nerves of steel to work with AI agents
by sadilek on Thursday November 05, 2026 @02:29AM
(#50376213)
Try this: Use Opus 5.5 on high. When it says it's done, ask it to review the change with a sub agent and with Codex Sol 6.1 high and to fix and iterate on the reviews until both reviewers are happy or the findings are nitpicking. Each re-review should be in a fresh context. In my experience, the result of this is very good.
Since what you describe what you want matches my recent switch to working as an "engineering director" of my agents, shameless plug for my own setup (non commercial, open source): https://obeya.si.
Re:You'll need nerves of steel to work with AI agents
by crog on Thursday November 05, 2026 @10:28AM
(#50380305)
ask your agents to teach you how approachable, well build setup work. either open source, either what the other plugged-in in the comments.
ask why at every answer your agent gives you. when it's clear, set it up. make it work for you, not you fitting the game
i started copy pasting 2 years ago, and it's ok
enjoy!
I’m not a Luddite, and the thing I most need at work now is a mid-seniority dev to support me. I don’t care if their name is Tanner, Prateek, Claude or Luna, I’ll take the help, except the meat-based variant is, IME, near impossible to hire (beats me - so many devs in the market, but the CV stack is deeply underwhelming, and the interviews only worse).
But every time I try to use AI agents - and frankly I only use the frontier ones as work pays for tokens - it’s basically what the author describes. Lots of random changes. The model happily saying it is doing X while also doing !X and also Y and Z, and sometimes gets stuck in some weird loop. Last time (admittedly not a frontier model but not far off) it wrote a Python script which would write another text file, with the contents defined as a concatenation of chr(XX) characters. That was enough.
Fixing or reviewing all this nonsense, or babysitting the model line by line takes more time than doing the damn thing myself.
So in short, it matches the behavior TFA describes. And yet lots of people see to be able to derive a lot of value out of it.
I have a lot of success writing medium length snippets with it, in a conversational style. Sort of up to 500-1000 LOC in things that aren’t challenging. Or building a scaffolding for a webpage. Or a non judgmental, zero lag replacement to SE/SO. But a mid senior dev ain’t that.
It’s not just a rant, any suggestions welcome.