Lesson 3 / 25

Strengths and Limits

List the tasks assistants handle well and the situations where they struggle.

Good at the common, weak at the unusual

Assistants shine at boilerplate, well-known libraries, small functions, translating between languages, explaining code, and drafting tests. They struggle with very new or obscure APIs, large hidden business rules, subtle concurrency and performance issues, and anything depending on context they were not shown. When the context is missing they tend to guess instead of asking.

A quick fit guide

Use this as a first guess, then adjust from your own experience with your tool and stack.

Usually good                          Be extra careful
-----------------------------------   ---------------------------------
CRUD endpoints, forms, boilerplate    security, auth, cryptography
Unit tests for pure functions         concurrency, race conditions
Regex and SQL drafts (then verify)    performance-critical loops
Explaining unfamiliar code            very new library versions
Format / language conversions         your private business rules

Ask it to say what it is unsure about

Add "list any assumptions you made and anything you are unsure about" to a request. It will not catch everything, but it often surfaces guesses about versions, missing files or unclear requirements that you can then confirm.

Quick check: Which task needs the most careful human review?

  • Renaming a variable
  • Formatting a JSON file
  • Adding a code comment
  • Authentication and cryptography code
Answer

Authentication and cryptography code — Security-critical code fails silently and the cost of a mistake is high.