[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":139},["ShallowReactive",2],{"writing-\u002Fwriting\u002Fi-still-read-what-my-agents-write":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"date":130,"description":131,"extension":132,"meta":133,"navigation":134,"path":135,"seo":136,"stem":137,"__hash__":138},"writing\u002Fwriting\u002F07.i-still-read-what-my-agents-write.md","I Still Read What My Agents Write",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":123},"minimark",[9,13,21,28,41,46,49,54,57,65,69,76,85,88,91,100,104,107,110,117,120],[10,11,12],"p",{},"A few days ago my team got together to talk about how we use AI. One engineer showed us his setup: he gives an agent a goal, and it spins up more agents with goals of their own. It was pretty cool. I asked how he keeps the whole thing from turning into slop.",[14,15,17],"div",{"style":16},"text-align: center",[18,19,20],"em",{},"\"I don't worry about it. A newer agent will clean it up.\"",[10,22,23,24,27],{},"I use agents a lot too. I haven't typed a line of code in almost a year. I suppose the difference is I still read what they write, and that's most of my week now. An agent makes a change in a day, and understanding it takes me the next few. Sitting next to someone running a whole tree of agents, I kind of wondered if ",[18,25,26],{},"I"," was falling behind.",[29,30,31,32,31,37],"figure",{},"\n  ",[33,34],"img",{"src":35,"alt":36},"\u002Fwriting\u002F07.i-still-read-what-my-agents-write\u002Fhero.webp","A giant yellow rubber duck types on a typewriter at the next desk while an engineer reads the first few inches of a paper strip that spills off his desk and out of frame.",[38,39,40],"figcaption",{},"He used to just listen.",[42,43,45],"h2",{"id":44},"the-patch-that-doubled","The Patch That Doubled",[10,47,48],{},"Last month I had an agent rebase one of my patches onto the latest version of the library. It came back almost twice as big. All the tests passed, but the agent had rewritten most of them, so of course they did.",[10,50,51],{},[18,52,53],{},"I don't love this, but I don't know why (yet).",[10,55,56],{},"Then I pulled up my original diff; it was so nice and small. Somewhere in the rebase the agent had undone a choice I'd made on purpose and bolted on a bunch of stuff. In a way, I'd already tried my colleague's approach: I handed an agent my code and let it handle the upkeep. It just didn't know what I meant.",[10,58,59,60,64],{},"So I asked it to say in one sentence what the change was for, and to throw out anything that didn't serve that sentence ",[61,62,63],"del",{},"(basically what I should've said the first time)",". It came back smaller than my original.",[42,66,68],{"id":67},"what-a-newer-agent-cant-know","What a Newer Agent Can't Know",[10,70,71,72,75],{},"I've started thinking about that patch in terms of ",[18,73,74],{},"intent density",": how much of the code came from someone deciding something on purpose. When I learned to program, that was pretty much every line (including the wrong ones). Now a short prompt turns into hundreds of lines, and most of the decisions are the model's.",[10,77,78,79,84],{},"Cleaning up is mostly deleting, and you can't delete the right things until you know what they're for. In a ",[80,81,83],"a",{"href":82},"\u002Fwriting\u002Fgood-engineers-worse-with-ai","recent post"," I wrote about a model that got a paper's code right except for one line (which was the whole idea of the paper). The model had swapped in the usual default. A newer agent would walk right past it.",[10,86,87],{},"For a lot of work, I think my colleague's right. If someone's written down what the code has to do, a newer agent has something to aim at. But someone had to understand the problem to write that down, and in research that's me.",[10,89,90],{},"I often start prompting before I know what I want. Reading what comes back is how I find out what I meant; skip that, and I'm just drawing the target around wherever the arrow landed. I won't pretend I understand every line of my research code. But I don't commit anything I can't explain in one sentence.",[29,92,31,93,31,97],{},[33,94],{"src":95,"alt":96},"\u002Fwriting\u002F07.i-still-read-what-my-agents-write\u002Ftarget.webp","An engineer holding a laptop paints a red target around an arrow already stuck in a barn wall.",[38,98,99],{},"Met every requirement on the first try.",[42,101,103],{"id":102},"my-interns-question","My Intern's Question",[10,105,106],{},"Today one of the interns I work with asked how I figure out the best way to do something, and how I review. Then he said everyone around him moves fast, and he doesn't always have time to understand what he's building. It's the same pressure I felt in that meeting, except I've got years of reading code to fall back on and he's just getting started.",[10,108,109],{},"I told him we probably know about the same things. The difference is a feel for when something's off. Most things in life aren't rocket science (and if you're building an actual rocket, you'll know going in), so start simple and only add complexity when a real case needs it. My patch got the opposite.",[10,111,112,113,116],{},"What I should've told him is that the feel comes from ",[18,114,115],{},"reading",": holding the code up against what it was supposed to do and noticing the gap, over and over. I wrote plenty of bad code as an intern, and I got better because I had to understand why it was bad. If he let an agent write his code and didn't read it, he'd never get that practice.",[10,118,119],{},"Neither would I.",[10,121,122],{},"That's what scares me. Reading is how I get better at the next problem, and if I stop, I'm not sure what's left of my job. I don't want him learning to skip it because there never seemed to be time, and I think it's on all of us to make sure the people around us get that time. Next time he asks, I'll tell him that part too.",{"title":124,"searchDepth":125,"depth":125,"links":126},"",2,[127,128,129],{"id":44,"depth":125,"text":45},{"id":67,"depth":125,"text":68},{"id":102,"depth":125,"text":103},"2026-10-19","A colleague lets newer agents clean up after older ones. I spend most of my week reading what mine write. Today an intern asked me how to tell when something's wrong.","md",{},true,"\u002Fwriting\u002Fi-still-read-what-my-agents-write",{"title":5,"description":131},"writing\u002F07.i-still-read-what-my-agents-write","25YHhQ4z7cZLu67Hf68sw_GYJwOZ8PBZWiTMs__TfMQ",1792538731398]