AI article
Nudging with Questions: Why Telling Your AI What to Fix Triggers an Apology Death Spiral (And How to Advance Juniors)
Community description: What I learned mentoring juniors for four decades seems to apply to today's agentic coding: why barking code fixes triggers sycophantic panic, and how Socratic questions yield 95%+ first-pass success.
Dev.to | Oct 3, 2026 | Randal L. Schwartz
Automated excerpt
Here is the updated code. " It patches line 42. Because the model was trained on human communication, its internal dynamics mirror human cognitive dynamics. The senior spends three minutes typing out a dense, paragraph-long imperative prompt explaining every line the AI should change.
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