Fast code still needs careful decisions
AI agents make implementation faster, but reviewing scope, complexity and maintenance remains your responsibility.
Alexander Claes2 min read
An AI agent can produce a working implementation before you have finished thinking through whether you need it. That makes it useful, but it also makes unnecessary work tempting.
When another feature or abstraction takes minutes to generate, accepting it feels inexpensive. Reviewing, understanding and maintaining it still takes effort.
Keep the original problem visible
A small request can turn into a much larger change. The agent introduces a reusable layer, adds configuration or restructures nearby code. Each decision may sound reasonable on its own.
You still need to ask whether those changes help solve the original problem. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they create more work than the request justified.
The speed of implementation should not decide the size of the solution.
Understand what you accept
A working result and passing checks give you useful evidence, but they do not tell you whether the design fits the project.
You need to understand how the change works, what happens when it fails and why its complexity is necessary. If you cannot explain it to another developer, you have more reviewing to do.
The agent may have written the code, but you decide whether it reaches users. Its suggestions become your decisions when you accept them.
Sometimes the most useful next instruction is to simplify what it has just written.