I’m using chat panel in Zed for asking arbitrary questions but that’s about this. I tried agent mode couple of times and it’s not for me. Writing is thinking, and when I don’t write code by hand I find myself out of the feedback loop. Tests IMO is a great example of this. If testing your code is hard, you know something is not right with how you do things. But if you outsource tests to AI, you won’t feel this.

I immediately thought of this tweet after reading this thread.

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Anyway, we’ve been using Claude Code to swap deprecated dependencies, add documentation, write missing tests and even implement small features. It does a pretty good job, especially after adding project specific guidelines to CLAUDE.md.

I asked Claude itself to create the guidelines with a focus on code conventions and patterns, which it did surprisingly well. Then I went through the file, adding, removing and fixing things here and there. For example there’s a section dedicated to testing, explaining how we use our test factory, how we use PhoenixTest for UI tests and so forth. The tests it generates follow our conventions and besides some minor issues like naming, I rarely have to fix anything. The documentation it generates is usually way too verbose and focuses on minute details. Usually it either gets it right the first time, or I have to spend more time talking to it than it would take to do the thing myself. Interesting times, to say the least.

GitHub - ash-project/usage_rules: A tool for synchronizing LLM rules files with your dependencies. is definitely worth a read.

Elixir dev, but 95% only backend, hardly any Phoenix code.
I am using AI mostly with the CLI: gemini or OpenAI’s codex. I use it mostly for analyzing bugs, and acutally never to generate any code. I did that once, and it became a enormous mess and I did not understand the generated code because it was not my own.
If I would generate any code, it would be very small fragments so I can keep control of the big picture.
I mix my editing by using vscode – (actually codium, because the copilot setup message, even though i did not have it installed and not want to, started to bother me) and lazyvim. Both options work good for me, having the windsurf plugin installed, and using that for code completion, not using the chat functionality (in neovim not installed).

@ragamuf Off topic but that is legitimately one of my favorite quotes ever:

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.

– David McCullough

“Writing is thinking”. Love it.