The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management
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Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management
#2Keep your scope as small as necessary, but no smaller. This has been fundamentally true for project management work breakdown structures for decades.
Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management
#3most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today
thanks for the article, it's a good one
Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management
#4I first tried getting specific with Claude Code. I made the Claude.md, I detailed how to do TDD, what steps it should take, the commands it should run. It was imperfect. Then I had it plan (think hard) and write the plan to a file. I’d clear context, have it read the plan, ask me questions, and then have it decompose the plan into a detailed plan of discrete tasks. Have it work its way through that. It would inevitably go sideways halfway through, even clearing context between each task. It wouldn’t run tests, it would commit breakage, it would flip flop between two different broken approaches, it was just awful. Now I’ve just been vibing, writing as little as possible and seeing what happens. That sucks, too.
It’s amazing at reviewing code. It will identify what you fear, the horrors that lie within the codebase, and it’ll bring them out into the sunlight and give you a 7 step plan for fixing them. And the coding model is good, it can write a function. But it can’t follow a plan worth shit. And if I have to be extremely detailed at the function by function level, then I should be in the editor coding. Claude code is an amazing niche tool for code reviews and dialogue and debugging and coping with new technologies and tools, but it is not a productivity enhancement for daily coding.
Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management
#5I first tried getting specific with Claude Code. I made the Claude.md, I detailed how to do TDD, what steps it should take, the commands it should run. It was imperfect. Then I had it plan (think hard) and write the plan to a file. I’d clear context, have it read the plan, ask me questions, and then have it decompose the plan into a detailed plan of discrete tasks. Have it work its way through that. It would inevitab…
With all due respect, you sound like someone who is just getting familiar with these tools. 100 more hours spent with AI coding and you will be much more productive. Coding with AI is a slightly different skill from coding, similar how managing software engineers is different from writing software.
Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management
#6most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today thanks for the article, it's a good one
It's true that I haven't been a hardcore agent-army vibe coder, I just try the popular ones once in a while in a naive way (isn't it the point of these tools, to have little friction ?), claude code for example. And it's cool ! But imperfect, and as this article attests, there's a lot of mental overhead to even have a shot at getting a decent output. And even if it's decent, it still needs to be reviewed and could include logical flaws.
I'd rather use it the other way, I'm the one in charge, and the AI reviews any logical flaw or things that I would have missed. I don't even have to think about context window since it'll only look at my new code logic.
So yeah, 3 years after the first ChatGPT and Copilot, I don't feel huge changes regarding "automated" AI programming, and I don't have any AI tool in my IDE, I pefer to have a chat using their website, to brainstorm, or occasionally find a solution to something I'm stuck on.
Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management
#7I first tried getting specific with Claude Code. I made the Claude.md, I detailed how to do TDD, what steps it should take, the commands it should run. It was imperfect. Then I had it plan (think hard) and write the plan to a file. I’d clear context, have it read the plan, ask me questions, and then have it decompose the plan into a detailed plan of discrete tasks. Have it work its way through that. It would inevitab…
With all due respect, you sound like someone who is just getting familiar with these tools. 100 more hours spent with AI coding and you will be much more productive. Coding with AI is a slightly different skill from coding, similar how managing software engineers is different from writing software.
Then, it's the job of someone else to use these tools, not developers
Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management
#8I first tried getting specific with Claude Code. I made the Claude.md, I detailed how to do TDD, what steps it should take, the commands it should run. It was imperfect. Then I had it plan (think hard) and write the plan to a file. I’d clear context, have it read the plan, ask me questions, and then have it decompose the plan into a detailed plan of discrete tasks. Have it work its way through that. It would inevitab…
With all due respect, you sound like someone who is just getting familiar with these tools. 100 more hours spent with AI coding and you will be much more productive. Coding with AI is a slightly different skill from coding, similar how managing software engineers is different from writing software.
liszper:
> most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today
Also liszper: oh, you tried the current approach and don’t agree with me? Well you just don’t know what you are doing.
Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management
#9most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today thanks for the article, it's a good one
> most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today
yes, just as was said each and every previous time OpenAI/anthropic shit out a new model
"now it doesn't suck!"
Re: The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management
#10most SWE folks still have no idea how big the difference is between the coding agents they tried a year ago and declared as useless and chatgpt 5 paired with Codex or Cursor today thanks for the article, it's a good one
I use agents for coding small stuff at work almost every day. I would say there has been some improvement compared to a year ago but it’s not any sort of step change. They still are only able to complete simple “intern-level” tasks around 50% of the time. Which is helpful but not revolutionary.