what is the minimal fix

one useful skill i picked up from the manual coding era is reduction.

ai agents love to add guardrails inside the repo because they can’t see that the same guardrail already exists in another part of the system.

then all the pieces come together and the user gets blocked twice from the same flow.

so i keep spamming esc to stop the agent and ask: what is the minimal fix that can finish the job?

most of the time the agent corrects itself mid-turn. minimal loc to get it done. no more spaghetti.

software maintenance skill is still in trend i guess. not exactly the end of the software engineer era like the doomers say.

sometimes less is better.