A developer asks the Hacker News community for advice on setting up a line-by-line or method-by-method agentic coding workflow, having grown dissatisfied with running tools like Claude Code and Codex independently and only vaguely scanning their output due to the resulting lack of codebase familiarity.
Background
- The post is from Hacker News ("Ask HN"), a Q&A-style discussion on the tech social news site Y Combinator's Hacker News, where developers ask the community for advice.
- "Claude Code" and "Codex" are AI coding agents: Claude Code is Anthropic's command-line tool that lets an LLM (Claude) write and edit code autonomously; Codex is OpenAI's similar tool (now evolved into parts of ChatGPT's coding features).
- The author has been letting these agents run freely (independently, vaguely scanning output) and finds the resulting codebase unfamiliar — the AI introduces patterns and structure the developer doesn't recognize, creating a maintenance and ownership problem.
- They want a "harness" — a controlled workflow or scaffolding — to force the agent to work line by line, file by file, method by method, so the human stays in sync with every change.
- "SOTA" = State of the Art. The author is asking what the current best practice is for tightly constrained, step-by-step agentic coding, as opposed to letting the AI refactor large swaths at once.
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