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.

Sign in to suggest edits

Key sources

  1. DISCUSSIONamoffatlobste.rs
Markdown