Questions and help - Sleeves Up Forum

How do you review a 600 line diff you did not write?

Sofia Lindqvist — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 16:48:11 +0000

This is the thing from my intro, asked properly.

I request a change, I get back a diff somewhere between 300 and 800 lines, and my review degrades into skimming for anything that looks alarming. Twice now I have approved something that was obviously wrong in hindsight, and CI caught it, which means the review contributed nothing except a delay.

Reviewing a colleague's 600 line change would also be bad, but at least I could ask them why they did it that way. Here there is no why beyond what I asked for.

I do not want the answer to be discipline. Discipline is the thing I ran out of. What is the process?

420k line Java monolith: how do you get it to know when it has not seen enough?

Daniel Osei — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 17:01:22 +0000

Policy admin system at work. Java, around 420 thousand lines, twenty years old, most of the original decisions undocumented and the people long gone.

Anything inside one package is fine. Anything that crosses packages gets me an answer that reads well and is wrong, because it never opened the file where the behaviour actually lives. I have watched it describe a validation rule confidently, based on nothing but the class name.

What I have tried. Feeding it the file tree, too big to be useful. Pointing it at specific files, which works but requires me to already know the answer. Asking it to search first, which helps until it stops after two or three hits and decides it has enough.

What are people doing on genuinely large old systems? I am not asking for it to understand the whole thing. I want it to reliably notice when it has not read enough to answer.

What actually goes in the brief when the job is a messy spreadsheet?

Marcus Bell — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:22:57 +0000

Not a developer, so apologies if this is beginner stuff.

I have a stock movement export, about 4000 rows a month, out of a system that writes dates three different ways depending on which depot keyed them in. I want a monthly summary by product line with returns split out.

When I ask for that I get something that looks right and is not. Last time it quietly dropped every row where the date would not parse, about 300 of them, and handed me a clean looking total that was 7 percent light. It did not mention doing it.

What do people put in the request to stop that happening? I have a feeling I am asking the wrong way rather than asking for the wrong thing.

Agent keeps editing files I did not ask it to touch

Diego Salazar — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 02:40:20 +0000

Client WordPress theme, php and a bit of js. I asked Claude Code to fix a bug in one template part. It fixed the bug, and it also reformatted webpack.config.js and rewrote two functions in a helper file that had nothing to do with anything.

The extra changes were not wrong exactly. They were just not asked for, and on a client site every extra line is something I have to explain if it breaks next month.

What I have tried. Telling it in the prompt to only touch the one file, which works maybe four times out of five. Listing the files up front and having it confirm before writing, which works better but is slow and I forget to do it when I am in a hurry.

Is there anything more reliable than remembering to ask nicely? Latest version, macOS.