by logicprog | 2025-08-17 19:38:29+00:00
Ah, yeah. Some agentic coding systems try to force you really heavily into clicking a loud. I don't think it's intentional, but like, I don't think they're really thinking through the workflow of someone who's picky and wants to be involved as much as I am. So they make it to that, you know, canceling things is really disruptive to the agent or difficult or annoying to do or something. And so it kind of railroads you into letting the agent do whatever it wants, and then trying to clean up after, which is a mess.

Typically, I just use something like QwenCode. One of the things I like about it, and I assume this is true of Gemini CLI as well, is that it's explicitly designed to make it as easy as possible to interrupt an agent in the middle of its thought or execution process and redirect it, or to reject its code changes and then directly iterate on them without having to recapitulate everything from the start. It's as easy as just hitting escape at any time. So I tell it what I want to do by usually giving like a little markdown formatted you know paragraph or so that's you know got some bullet points or some numbers maybe a heading or two, explaining the exact architecture and logic I want for a feature, not just the general feature. And then I let it kind of get started and I see where it's going. And if I generally agree with the approach that it's taking, then I let it turn out a diff. And then if I like the diff after reading through it fully, then I accept it. And if there's anything I don't like about it at all, then I hit Escape and tell it what to change about the disc before it even gets to merge it in.

There are three advantages to this workflow over the chat GPT copy and paste workflow.

One is that the agent can automatically use grep and find and read source files, which makes it much easier and more convenient to load it up with all of the context that it needs to understand the existing style architecture and purpose of your codebase. Thus, it typically generates code that I'm willing to accept more often without me doing a ton of legwork.

The second is that it allows the agent to automatically of its own accord, run things like linters, type checkers, compilers, and tests, and automatically try to fix any warnings or errors in that result, so that it's more likely to produce correct code that adheres to whatever style guide I've provided. Of course, again I could run those tools manually, manually and copy and paste the output into a chat window, but that's just enough extra effort and friction after I've gotten what's ostensibly something working that I know I would be likely to be lazy and not do that at some point. This sort of ensures that it's always done. Some tools like OpenCode even automatically run LSPs and linters and feed that back into the model after the diff is applied automatically, thus allowing it to automatically correct things.

Third, this has the benefit of forcing the AI to use small and localized diffs to generate code, instead of regenerating whole files or just autoregressively completing or filling in the middle for things, which makes it way easier to keep up with what it's doing and make sure you know everything that's going on. It can't slip subtle modifications past you, or, and doesn't tend to generate 400 lines of nonsense.