Re:Ask HN: Do you still need to know whats going on in the c...
by esalman on Saturday November 14, 2026 @02:12PM
(#50499849)
Yes.
For my latest project, I did spec driven development and Opus 5.5 generated 7000+ lines of code. Around 500,000 tokens were spent on iterating on the spec document alone, while me and Opus both asked clarifying questions to each other to nail down specifics.
Granted, Opus writes better code than me and has better picture of the codebase which comes in handy when making small adjustments, once the code is ready and tested. I do ask Opus to keep cyclomatic complexity of the code low, so it does not look obfuscated at all and the blast radius of such changes are smaller.
While stepping through the code, I still found issues. For example, it did not validate max_turn value for an agent harness, so it was possible to run infinite turns with a non-integer input. We have some organizational complexity with multiple model gateways, and Opus made some wrong assumptions about model availability. There were 4-5 such issues that wouldn't be visible if I was not doing step-by-step debugging.
For my latest project, I did spec driven development and Opus 5.5 generated 7000+ lines of code. Around 500,000 tokens were spent on iterating on the spec document alone, while me and Opus both asked clarifying questions to each other to nail down specifics.
Granted, Opus writes better code than me and has better picture of the codebase which comes in handy when making small adjustments, once the code is ready and tested. I do ask Opus to keep cyclomatic complexity of the code low, so it does not look obfuscated at all and the blast radius of such changes are smaller.
While stepping through the code, I still found issues. For example, it did not validate max_turn value for an agent harness, so it was possible to run infinite turns with a non-integer input. We have some organizational complexity with multiple model gateways, and Opus made some wrong assumptions about model availability. There were 4-5 such issues that wouldn't be visible if I was not doing step-by-step debugging.