Two days ago I went through the feature flags in my own app. The registry, the thing in the source that says which features are on, had ten of them marked dark in production. A runtime override had had every one live for between one and six weeks, with no deploy involved. Four more said off in the code and were on at 100% across web, iOS and Android. So for over a month, any agent reading my source to work out what a learner sees would have described screens confidently and been wrong. The live state was never in the source to begin with. I build a small Dutch exam prep app almost entirely with a coding agent, and that is the thing that costs me time. Not the code it writes. It also adds more surface in a week than I am going to open and check by hand. So I spent about two weeks building it a way to look instead of infer. It walks the deployed app signed in, keeps what it saw, and answers “show me the referral flow” with the actual screens, dated. Sunday’s answer took about 50 seconds. Two things I learned that hold regardless of what I do next. Looking and asserting are different jobs: a screenshot used as an assertion costs tokens every single run, which is what this sub worked out the hard way last week, while one used to answer “what is there” is paid once and reread for free. And it has to say what it did not see. Sunday’s answer named the steps it had not reached, which is the only reason I trusted the ones it did. Before I put more into this, what does everyone else do? When your agent needs to know what a screen looks like right now, does it read the code, drive a browser, or do you screenshot it yourself? Has reading the code instead of looking ever sent it the wrong way? How much of what your agent ships do you actually open and look at? “The code is enough, this is a non problem” is a genuinely useful answer. submitted by /u/Pooyahrtn
Originally posted by u/Pooyahrtn on r/ClaudeCode