[rspeele]

You take advantage of the property that verifying / sanity-checking an answer is usually much easier and faster than figuring out the answer in the first place.

It's similar to how Google has been useful for the past few decades despite the internet being full of junk info. Except Google could only provide semi-reliable information about stuff that's public knowledge with lots of people talking about it, whereas Claude can provide semi-reliable information about your own code that nobody else has ever laid eyes on.

A few months ago I used this to re-acquaint myself with code I myself had written back in 2017-2018[1]. I wanted to add some new features, and I did NOT want AI to write them, because the existing codebase was my own sweat and tears and running it through the slop extruder would cheapen that original work. I wanted to write all the code myself with full understanding of what was going on. Now, it had been many years and the codebase did some pretty esoteric stuff. I was the only person in the world who ever knew what that code did, and I didn't know it like the back of my hand anymore. Particularly the stuff with runtime CIL generation for result set processing.

I did a lot of reading my own code and a lot of thinking about it to get that understanding back, but it was a very helpful tool to be able to bounce my questions off an agent during the process and then investigate its answers for accuracy. And greater than 90% of the time its answers turned out to be correct.

[1]https://github.com/fsprojects/Rezoom.SQL