Thursday, Oct 1, 2026
When reviewing large amounts of AI-generated code, I often find that the LLM chooses terms for abstractions that do not always map to my own choices. For instance, what it may call a MutationIntent might personally be more natural to me as an EditRequest . Because the LLM's choice of words is not my ideal choice, I have to do a mental lookup of what it means every time I see it, which adds cognitive load. This may seem like a small friction, but the cognitive load accumulates when considering how dozens of new terms interact in unfamiliar code. I can only hold a finite number of these semantic lookups in my head before I start misinterpreting how things work. To minimize this, before review, I post-process AI changes with this prompt: I then go through and confirm term choices. The AI does find-and-replace everywhere, including documentation. The resulting code is much easier to review because now it's written more like it came from my brain.
Key sources
- DISCUSSIONamoffatlobste.rs