this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 5 points 6 days ago (24 children)

Have you tried giving it coding standards and other such preferences about how you like your code to be organized? I've found that coding agents can be quite adaptable to various styles, you can put stuff like "try to keep functions less than 100 lines long" or "include assertions validating all function inputs" into your coding agent's general instructions and it'll follow them.

For me, one of the things that's a huge fundamental improvement is telling the agent to create and run unit tests for everything. That way when it does mess up accidentally it can immediately catch the problem and usually fixes it in the same session without further intervention. Unit tests used to be more trouble than they were worth most of the time, now I love them.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 0 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Unit tests used to be more trouble than they were worth most of the time, now I love them.

Sounds like you were writing bad unit tests and AI showed you how to do it right.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

If so, it was project-wide across hundreds of devs.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 2 points 4 days ago

There was a time when nobody wrote unit tests, not so long ago, really.

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