Live data from Hacker News

Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system

github.com

11–20 of 278 posts

Re: Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system

#11
post #4

With GSD, I was able to write 250K lines of code in less than a month, without prior knowledge of claude.

250K? Could you expand your experience with details about your project and the lessons and issues you found?

A self-hosted VPN server manager: a TypeScript/Hono backend that runs on your own VPS, paired with a SwiftUI iOS/macOS app. It lets you provision cloud servers across multiple providers (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr), manage them via a Tailscale-secured connection with TLS pinning, and control an OpenClaw gateway.

I will open source it soon in few weeks, as I have still complete few more features.

Re: Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system

#12

I've tried it, and I'm not convinced I got measurably better results than just prompting claude code directly. It absolutely tore through tokens though. I don't normally hit my session limits, but hit the 5-hour limits in ~30 minutes and my weekly limits by Tuesday with GSD.

Same experience on multiple occasions.

Re: Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system

#13
post #3

With GSD, I was able to write 250K lines of code in less than a month, without prior knowledge of claude.

I could copy 250k lines from github. Faster than using ai. Cheaper. Code is better tested/more secure. I can learn/build with other humans.

This is how I test my code currently.

  1. Backend unit tests — fast in-memory tests that run the full suite in ~5 seconds on every save.                                                                 
  2. Full end-to-end tests — automated UI tests that spin up a real cloud server, run through the entire user journey (provision → connect → manage → teardown), and
   verify the app behaves correctly on all supported platforms (phone, tablet, desktop).                                                                            
  3. Screenshot regression tests — every E2E run captures named screenshots and diffs them against saved baselines. Any unintended UI change gets caught            
  automatically.

Re: Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system

#14
I like openspec, it lets you tune the workflow to your liking and doesn’t get in the way.

I started with all the standard spec flow and as I got more confident and opinionated I simplified it to my liking.

I think the point of any spec driven framework is that you want to eventually own the workflow yourself, so that you can constraint code generation on your own terms.

Re: Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system

#15
post #3

With GSD, I was able to write 250K lines of code in less than a month, without prior knowledge of claude.

I could copy 250k lines from github. Faster than using ai. Cheaper. Code is better tested/more secure. I can learn/build with other humans.

I was not a app developer before, but a systems engineer with devops experience. But I learnt a lot about apple development, app store connect and essential became a app developer in a month. I don't think I can learn so quickly with other humans help.

Re: Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system

#16
post #4

With GSD, I was able to write 250K lines of code in less than a month, without prior knowledge of claude.

250K? Could you expand your experience with details about your project and the lessons and issues you found?

It's important to build a local dev environment that GSD can iterate on. Once I have done that, I just discuss with GSD and few hours later features land.

Re: Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system

#17
I've been using GSD extensively over the past 3 months. I previously used speckit, which I found lacking. GSD consistently gets me 95% of the way there on complex tasks. That's amazing. The last 5% is mostly "manual" testing. We've used GSD to build and launch a SaaS product including an agent-first CMS (whiteboar.it).

It's hard to say why GSD worked so much better for us than other similar frameworks, because the underlying models also improved considerably during the same period. What is clear is that it's a huge productivity boost over vanilla Claude Code.

Re: Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system

#18

I've had a good experience with https://github.com/obra/superpowers . At first glance this looks similar. Has anyone tried both who can offer a comparison?

It's one of those things where having a structure is really helpful - I've used some similar prompt scaffolds, and the difference is very noticeable.

Another great technique is to use one of these structures in a repo, then task your AI with overhauling the framework using best practices for whatever your target project is. It works great for creative writing, humanizing, songwriting, technical/scientific domains, and so on. In conjunction with agents, these are excellent to have.

I think they're going to be a temporary thing - a hack that boosts utility for a few model releases until there's sufficient successful use cases in the training data that models can just do this sort of thing really well without all the extra prompting.

These are fun to use.

Re: Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system

#19

I've had a good experience with https://github.com/obra/superpowers . At first glance this looks similar. Has anyone tried both who can offer a comparison?

I've used both From my experience, gsd is a highly overengineered piece of software that unfortunately does not get shit done, burns limits and takes ages while doing so. Quick mode does not really help because it kills the point of gsd, you can't build full software on ad-hocs. I've used plain markdown planning before, but it was limiting and not very stable, superpowers looks like a good middleground

Re: Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system

#20
post #9

> If you know clearly what you want This is the real challenge. The people I know that jump around to new tools have a tough time explaining what they want, and thus how new tool is better than last tool.

What do you think drives the tooling ecosystem aside from VC dollars?

These are incredible new superpowers. The LLMs let us do far far more than we could before. But it creates information glut, doesn't come with in built guards to prevent devolution from setting in. It feels unsurprising but also notable that a third of what folks are suddenly building is harness/prompting/coordination systems, because it's all trying to adapt & figure out process shapes for using these new superpowers well in.

There's some VC money interest but I'd classify more than 9 / 10ths of it as good old fashioned wildcat open source interest. Because it's fascinating and amazing, because it helps us direct our attention & steer our works.

And also it's so much more approachable and interesting, now that it's all tmux terminal stuff. It's so much more direct & hackable than, say, wading into vscode extension building, deep in someone else's brambly thicket of APIs, and where the skeleton is already in place anyhow, where you are only grafting little panes onto the experience rather than recasting the experience. The devs suddenly don't need or care for or want that monolithic big UI, and have new soaring freedom to explore something much nearer to them, much more direct, and much more malleable: the terminal.

There's so many different forms of this happening all at once. Totally different topic, but still in the same broad area, submitted just now too: Horizon, an infinite canvas for trrminals/AI work. https://github.com/peters/horizon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47416227

Post reply on HN