I previously let an AI agent build an entire social media site in one day. It worked, but then it introduced a bug that neither I nor the agent could fix because I had no idea what the code did.
Now I want to rebuild it. I want to use AI again, but this time as an assistant – I’ll review every change, write tests together, and keep a clear plan.
Which AI tool would you recommend for this hybrid approach? How do you structure prompts to force the agent to explain before coding?
Also, do you think a couple of weeks is realistic to rebuild the site that has feature parity with Lemmy and a few extra features that the AI managed to build in a single day? Should I switch to a more manual approach with the agent only for boilerplate?
Any advice is appreciated. Thanks!
It depends, do you want to learn or do you want to get something fast and don’t care how?
If you want to learn don’t let AI write anything. Ask it questions if you don’t understand, ask it to explain, but wrte everything yourself.
If you want to get something that works and don’t care how, make extensive tests. Use a minimum test coverage. Automaric AI reviewing the PR of the AI, And keep the agent going until it passes the CI.
To awnser your question specifically read the plans very carefully. Most of the time the agents execute the plan fairly faithfully, you don’t need to correct the code much if you make sure to read the initial plan very carefully and make changes on where it made a mistake.
This does build on the fact that you can actually understand what its writing, if you can’t, go with the first approach and don’t use AI at all for writing code.