Make Small PRs And Read Your Code

It has been quite some time since I’ve written here. Things have been busy in life and generally I haven’t had any motivation to share knowledge or concepts, I see that the content I put out is not bad, but there is better out there and there is less and less to contribute also in the age of AI.

But from my extensive experience of working on AI projects, making an AI sales/account manager and using coding tools like Cursor, Claude Code or Codex extensively professionally or in personal projects like Detective Kai, one thing I’ve understood is to keep the scope of your changes small.

It’s very tempting to let the coding models implement every idea you’ve had and see them in action, and this temptation is what makes you lose grasp of the project. Once a change is around 2k or more lines of code, then you’re not in the driver’s seat but more of a passenger in the ride. Rather than understanding the full picture, you start relying on the tool to explain the nitty-gritty of the system. And when this starts happening, it’s not good. This is what leads to debugging hell, where you know something is wrong but cannot fix it as you now don’t understand the systems you’ve built.

The modern AI evangelist will argue “skill issue” and just prompt the system bro, but I’ve used Fable and GPT-5.6-sol at max thinking as well, but the problem remains the same, these models don’t solve for the longevity of the project, but they solve immediate problems which you present. It could be due to the post-training RL being done, but they want to solve the immediate issue and not care about how it affects the system in the long run. Only humans care about this. You care about whether the elements are modular or not, whether the complexity of the solution is in line with the gains it brings, etc. These things are important, and while the intelligence of these models has grown, their context hasn’t, and we know that increasing the context is not trivial, so on larger projects, which anyone who goes beyond a POC will eventually face, it’s not possible to rely on these models alone to carry you, and earlier if the scope of your work was larger, it was okay. Yes, no one could have realistically reviewed your 5k lines of code change PR, but you understood it. Now with AI pumping out these humongous PRs, the trouble is even you don’t understand it. So my suggestion is to scope it down and read your own code.