Mistakes AI Coding Agents Make
I use Codex to write tools while I walk. Here are merged PRs: Add editable system prompt Standardize toast notifications Persist form fields Fix SVG handling in page2md Add Google Tasks exporter Add Markdown table to CSV tool Replace simple alerts with toasts Add CSV joiner tool Add SpeakMD tool This added technical debt. I spent four hours fixing the AI generated tests and code. What mistakes did it make? Inconsistency. It flips between execCommand("copy") and clipboard.writeText(). It wavers on timeouts (50 ms vs 100 ms). It doesn’t always run/fix test cases. Missed edge cases. I switched <div> to <form>. My earlier code didn’t have a type="button", so clicks reloaded the page. It missed that. It also left scripts as plain <script> instead of <script type="module"> which was required. Limited experimentation. My failed with a HTTP 404 because the common/ directory wasn’t served. I added console.logs to find this. Also, happy-dom won’t handle multiple exports instead of a single export { ... }. I wrote code to verify this. Coding agents didn’t run such experiments. What can we do about it? Three things could have helped me: ...