> Perhaps if we make the AI write down somewhere, as briefly as possible, why it wrote each chunk of code...
Well-configured agents do, in comments and commit messages and docs.
But many people are just stuck thinking in GPT-3 era, where the prompt was all there was to it. It's not. You write a 1000 token prompt describing what you want, and the agent pulls in 10k tokens of system prompt, then spends time exploring the codebase and calling tools and attending to 100k of more tokens from this, possibly including output of sub-sessions that do the above, and somewhere along the way, having read lots of code, run lots of tests, perhaps doing a spike or two, the agent then decides some chunk of code needs to be written in this way, and not in some other way.
The reason is not contained in your original prompt at all. It's almost entirely based on what the agent learned about the current state of your codebase and environment.
Well-configured agents do, in comments and commit messages and docs.
But many people are just stuck thinking in GPT-3 era, where the prompt was all there was to it. It's not. You write a 1000 token prompt describing what you want, and the agent pulls in 10k tokens of system prompt, then spends time exploring the codebase and calling tools and attending to 100k of more tokens from this, possibly including output of sub-sessions that do the above, and somewhere along the way, having read lots of code, run lots of tests, perhaps doing a spike or two, the agent then decides some chunk of code needs to be written in this way, and not in some other way.
The reason is not contained in your original prompt at all. It's almost entirely based on what the agent learned about the current state of your codebase and environment.