Stop Reading, Start Asking

If you've ever been dropped into a codebase you didn't write, you'll know the feeling of not trusting anything until you've read it, and reading all of it takes weeks. This workflow hands the exploring to an AI coding agent instead, so you can walk into any repo, get it running, map it out and plan your first change in an afternoon. None of it depends on the stack, so grab a codebase you don't know and follow along.

The demo repo has a few hundred files in it. Nobody's reading all of that, and most of it wouldn't matter for whatever you've been asked to do anyway. What you actually want is the answer to today's question, and that's a search problem. Agents are really good at search problems.

The loop the whole workflow runs on has three parts:

• Ask a real question. Something you'd genuinely want to know on day one, like where authorisation gets checked when a user edits feedback they submitted. The agent doesn't read the whole project. It searches, follows the route through to the handler, and on into wherever the rules live, which is pretty much what a senior dev who'd never seen the repo would do.
• Require the file and line. The end of the prompt is what makes the answer checkable: the exact file and line for every claim, the code it's citing quoted back, and an admission when it isn't sure.
• Open the cited line and check. Go to the line it gave you and confirm the code does what the agent said. It takes about ten seconds.

The checking isn't optional. Ask what happens to a user's ideas, comments and votes when they delete their account, and the answer reads well, has citations, and all hangs together. Then you open the line behind the most interesting claim, and it doesn't do what the answer says. The agent isn't lying to you, it's guessed from a pattern it's seen in a thousand other codebases. Most of the time that guess is right, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. Point it back at the code it cited and it corrects itself.

Keep the citation phrasing on every prompt from here on, and try it now: ask the repo you've been avoiding the question you've always wondered about, then go and check the line.