Sansi, how do you review AI-written code these days?
AI writes more and more of my code now, and I can barely keep up.
What's worse, this project of mine was built by AI from the very start — sometimes I don't even know my way around the directory structure.
I honestly don't review the code much anymore.
Huh? Aren't you worried AI will mess things up?
I am.
So now I mainly review its plan. If the plan looks right, I let it write. When it's done, I check whether the feature actually works.
As for how it's implemented — honestly, that's becoming a black box to me.
But plans are long too.
That's what annoys me the most. For anything even slightly complex, AI writes a plan that's thousands of words. Reading it is more exhausting than reading code.
That's why I don't really read plain-text plans anymore. I have AI draw diagrams for me instead.
Mermaid?
But Mermaid gets scary when it's complex. It turns into a tangle of lines.
Haha, that's why I mostly use PlantUML now.
What's PlantUML?
You've studied UML, right?
Vaguely. That thing from the software engineering course?
Right. Sequence diagrams, state diagrams, class diagrams — that kind of thing.
PlantUML is writing UML as text. It's a bit like Mermaid, and you can drop it straight into a Markdown code block.
But it's better suited for these software-engineering diagrams.
Ah, that does sound more readable than a thousand-word plan.
How do you use it? A VS Code plugin?
For VS Code, just install the PlantUML plugin.
Problem is I mostly write code in the terminal now. I haven't opened VS Code in ages 😂
Then it's even simpler.
Install the docu.md Chrome extension, and have AI output the plan, PlantUML, and everything else into a docs directory.
Then open that directory with docu.md, and you can see the rendered docs and diagrams.
Oh nice, that works.
I'll give it a try. Thanks, Sansi.