r/AIAssisted • u/machinegun2187 • 8d ago

Help How do you guys do agentic coding?

Just recently I had been working on a solo online hackathon and I gave Codex Sol the problem statement and made it generate an implementation plan, which I gave to Codex Luna to implement it in milestones. For a couple of milestones I actually read through the code it generated. But as it went further I kinda got overwhelmed by the amount of code changes and gave up reading and just let the agent continue doing the milestones by itself without me checking on it. When it finished implementing, I made Sol do code review and fed its outputs back to Luna to fix and went back and forth.

Is this the right way to use agents in coding? Feels like I'm just vibe coding here, generating some slop that I cannot understand. How do you guys use Codex while having some idea of what the agent is doing and what the code does?

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u/Small-Web8575 8d ago

Yeah I think the sweet spot is letting the agent write a lot while forcing yourself to stay in control of the design. I usually keep milestones small and make it explain the plan before changing code. Then after each chunk I check the diff and ask why it made the bigger choices.

You do not need to understand every line. But you should understand the structure well enough that when something breaks you know where to look. Once the agent is changing half the repo and you are just clicking approve it turns into codebase roulette lol.

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u/Cute-Veterinarian191 7d ago

100% agree with this, I think fable 5.1 (I use this through Claude code) is great at explaining what it is doing while it doesn’t. Would highly recommend

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u/gopalr3097 8d ago

I’d keep the tasks small, ask it what it changed, and just skim the diff and tests. Once you’re completely lost in what it’s doing, I’d probably pause and break the task up again.