Heh. Interesting article.
> Single developer projects can build to the caliber and consistency of large development teams.
This has always been true. Good developers, like truly good devs, could run rings around a team of mediocre devs. It’s a multiplier, a team of 10 1x devs will get dominated by a single 10x dev no matter how much AI they use. Nothing has changed here, if anything it benefits the good developers.
> At the moment my rig is supported by two subscriptions (Cursor, Claude) that I can augment with Pi as needed.
This conflicts subscriptions with an actual harness, doesn’t bode well for the rest of the article…
> Recently I learned about prewalk, Can Bölük's technique that uses frontier for the planning phase and first task, then hands off once the pattern is set.
This pattern has been known for years and is not attributable to a single person.
> Exploration leads to a plan formalized into an explicit DAG (directed acyclic graph) task list. Then a worker takes over, focusing on implementing the DAG one node at a time. Once complete, I bring in the critic to simplify and question what was implemented. Often this phase will push back enough that the worker phase is revisited. But once satisfied, the critic gives way to a promoter, which is my reminder that a job is not complete until you've properly communicated it to others.
I’ve tried all these complicated workflows. In the end the best way to use LLMs is to give it some instructions, take a look at the code, and then ask it for changes. At the end, ask it (in a fresh session) to review the changes for bugs or incorrect assumptions and architecture. Rinse and repeat. Anything more complex is over engineering.
None of the rest of the article seems particularly interesting. Just more busywork.
> HUMANIST SOFTWARE DEVELOPER
Uh huh?