Common Development Tasks

Overview

This page gathers common approaches for handling everyday development work with Qoder CLI CN — from exploring unfamiliar code, fixing bugs, and refactoring, to writing tests, committing, and reviewing. Each category comes with prompt examples you can use verbatim and adapt to your own project. All examples assume interactive mode. For how to launch, see Running Tasks.

Exploring and understanding code

When facing an unfamiliar codebase, have Qoder build an overall picture for you first:

Walk me through the overall architecture and main modules of this project
Where is this feature implemented? Which files are involved?
Starting from the entry point, explain how a request gets handled
Where is this function called from?

Qoder searches the code and reads the relevant files on its own, giving explanations with file locations. You can follow up on its answers to dig deeper step by step.

Fixing bugs

Describe the symptom and let Qoder locate and fix it:

Why does this test fail? Fix it for me
Run npm test, find the cause of the failure, and fix it
This endpoint occasionally errors under concurrency — help me investigate

A safe approach is to have Qoder reproduce the problem and explain the cause first, then make the change. For issues with a large blast radius, confirm the approach with Plan first — see Plan Before Executing.

Refactoring

Refactoring usually spans multiple files; describe the goal and constraints clearly:

Extract the date-handling functions in utils into a standalone module and update all references
Unify the error handling in this directory while keeping external behavior unchanged
Convert these callbacks to async/await without changing the logic

Before and after refactoring, pair the work with tests and code review to confirm behavior hasn't changed — see Reviewing Changes. Larger refactors are a good fit for planning with Plan first.

Implementing features

Start from a requirement and let Qoder code:

Implement an Express middleware for request rate limiting
Fill in the corresponding client methods based on this API spec
Add form validation and error messages to this page

Qoder supports multimodal input. You can attach design mockups or screenshots and have it generate code from them.

Writing and running tests

Add unit tests for this module, covering the main branches
Write a regression test for the change we just made
Run the tests and fix the failing cases

Having Qoder run tests proactively after writing code creates an "implement — verify — fix" loop. To have it keep fixing until everything passes, use Goal — see Working Toward a Goal.

Commits and PRs

Generate a commit message for this change
Split the related changes into a few semantically clear commits
Summarize this branch's changes relative to main and write a PR description

For Git operations, Qoder asks for confirmation before executing, according to your permission settings. For permission control, see Permissions and Directory Trust.

Code review

Review your changes once before committing:

Review my current changes and find potential issues
Review this feature branch against the main branch

You can also use /review directly to choose the review scope — see Reviewing Changes.

Tips

Describe goals and constraints clearly: stating what you want and what should not change significantly improves result quality.
Focus on one thing at a time: splitting a complex task into steps is more controllable than describing all requirements at once.
Make good use of project instructions: write project conventions into AGENTS.md and Qoder will follow them in every session — see Memory.
Large codebases: for practices on big repositories and monorepos, see Best Practices for Large Codebases.

​Overview

​Exploring and understanding code

​Fixing bugs

​Refactoring

​Implementing features

​Writing and running tests

​Commits and PRs

​Code review

​Tips