Stop Arguing with the Agent: The Single-Pass Coding Paradigm
Over the last few weeks, working with AI coding tools like Codex and Claude Code has been a real eye-opener. But if I am being honest, it has also brought a fair share of frustration. The biggest headache? These tools love an arbitrary code dump. You ask for a quick fix in one place, and before you know it, the agent has rewritten half the project, altered adjacent files you never asked it to touch, and left you with a massive cleanup job. It makes you realize that while we might be moving away from line-by-line manual coding, we are spending just as much time policing the agent's side effects. Flipping the Approach: From Chatting to Compiling Instead of layering correction after correction in a long, messy chat thread—where the AI gets confused and loses the plot—I've been thinking about a much cleaner paradigm: Run a test prompt: Let the agent have a crack at the problem in a clean sandbox or branch. Spot the missing constraints: Look closely at where it went ...