Using AI in a Slower Way Increased the Quality of my Work

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I think the way most people use coding agents is to 1. prompt the agent, 2. review its output, then repeat the cycle from there until a suitable finished product is created.

Working this way, I’ve frequently gotten stuck in the common trap of not having the full context on what the agent did, unless I take the time to fully review everything the agent did and internalize it. The longer this loop continues, the less context I have about how my codebase works as a whole. Of course it’s possible to ask the agent questions to understand newly generated code better, but at that point I’ve lost most of my mental model for the codebase and am effectively doing archaeology on my own project.

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Using AI in a Slower Way Increased the Quality of my Work