[flagged]
Automating myself out of development
31–40 of 97 posts
Re: Automating myself out of development
#32I don't know if I’m overly critical but there’s gotta be a middle ground between totally AI pilled people that otherwise have no talents, and control freak veteran developers who cant let go My current process is also using Github projects in a normal scrum style way, with many tickets written or fleshed out and state managed by the LLM, and it doubling as the memory system Completely leapfrogging all these other ope…
All these people saying UI/UX is dead, then I see their designs and they're absolutely the worst (but they're always swearing by how incredible it is). Sorry access to an LLM (even if it could center a div reliably and make a responsive designs, it can't) does not give you taste, intuition or make you good at building user interfaces. You people/sloppers have no idea the amount of sweat that gets poured into great UX…
I’ve seen that slop but
Claude Design has barely been out for a month
And it’s fulfilled my needs better than v0, lovable, playwright via LLM or just iterating in the coding LLM. I’ve worked with graphic designers my whole career and have also contracted design agencies to do style guides and collaborate on branding and layouts. I’ve gotten the output that I’m looking for with Claude Design
eventually you’ll see examples but its not in my purview to publicly link any of my projects as being vibe coded
Re: Automating myself out of development
#33I don't know if I’m overly critical but there’s gotta be a middle ground between totally AI pilled people that otherwise have no talents, and control freak veteran developers who cant let go My current process is also using Github projects in a normal scrum style way, with many tickets written or fleshed out and state managed by the LLM, and it doubling as the memory system Completely leapfrogging all these other ope…
Could be (the overcomplicating part), I'm just not yet comfortable loosing the mental model of the final application. At least not in all types of tickets. Are you not seeing that?..
I focus on one side project at a time, alongside work applications
Both are giving me skillsets to excel in the other domain
I watch the subagents, push back on some choices, look at commits and glance at pull requests
Re: Automating myself out of development
#34I wish people would describe in more detail the tasks they use LLMs to code. My experience is that simple components in an existing architecture are fine, but anything requiring architectural considerations quickly becomes a mess. On my projects (e.g. a ui framework), running multiple agents in parallel would just increase the speed at which it can stuff up the project.
I found that this guys stuff has really helped me:
https://youtu.be/-QFHIoCo-Ko?is=FYYdukWluYX3vdQL
Worth a watch.
Re: Automating myself out of development
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Proper review should take longer than writing it yourself, because you need to know the correct solution, understand the proposed solution, and evaluate the difference between the two. When designing it yourself, you just need to know the correct solution and write it, and with modern high-level languages and IDEs with autocomplete writing it is hardly a bottleneck.
It is harder to solve a sudoku than verify a solution's correctness. I find similar benefits occasionally when coding with LLMs.
Sudoku’s constraints are knownn and easy to build an harness for. Software has a more malleable structure. An harness is hard to build and the tests cases for the constraints can be a lot.
Re: Automating myself out of development
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used LLMs to develop Whistle Enterprise ( https://whistle-enterprise.com ) from the ground up, from scratch. It's taken _a lot_ of time and effort, but this is an example of what can be developed using LLMs alone. You have to have dedication and a goal to reach, but you can absolutely build anything if you're building with the right foundations in mind.
I think the relevant question isn’t what can be built but the amount of effort in comparison to doing this the old fashioned way. What do you think the productivity gain was from using an LLM? This question assumes you’re already an experienced developer.
There’s no free lunch, it takes time and effort still. And expertise if you need it to be robust.
In terms of velocity, let me offer some numbers. In 6 months I generated >150k lines of code and merged 10k PRs to ship and iterate on https://plotalong.app
I follow best practices and isolate agents to continuously deployed dev environments, semi-manually review PRs and gate the release process between multiple protected envs. The project is getting close to 500 end-to-end tests in Playwright.
That’s just working nights and weekends. Before AI, it took my team at the office 4 years to produce this much work. There are some qualitative differences but the speed and results are real
Re: Automating myself out of development
#37Interestingly, despite it being much more detailed and a lot more process and procedure than what I currently do - which is more akin to the version 0 described, but in parallel - we come up at the same final problem: reviews and quality assurance. I sign off the code I merged, part of company policy but also just to be sure it is actually decent. But reviewing has become the real draining bottleneck: even stacked PR…
For decades, engineers understood that large code reviews are harder than small ones. Out of both politeness and a desire to receive better code reviews, we learned to break our large changes into smaller chunks. Some engineers took things even further and replaced code reviews with pair programming. But then LLMs showed up and everyone seems to have forgotten those lessons. They can be still be applied now using cod…
Agree with this completely. This push for more autonomy I think is the complete wrong direction for how to use LLMs.
I want less code to maintain not more that I don't even fully understand.
I think research and very supervised coding with lots of guardrails is the way to actually gain productivity from these tools.
Re: Automating myself out of development
#38I wish people would describe in more detail the tasks they use LLMs to code. My experience is that simple components in an existing architecture are fine, but anything requiring architectural considerations quickly becomes a mess. On my projects (e.g. a ui framework), running multiple agents in parallel would just increase the speed at which it can stuff up the project.
Me when not trying to meet management expectations, only as smarter code completion, formatting code, basic code analysis, and helping copy pasting code examples between languages.
Me when meeting management expectations, agent orchestration tools like Boomi and Workato calling into tools, doing with AI what a few years ago would be done with BPEL.
Re: Automating myself out of development
#39[flagged]
Re: Automating myself out of development
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Proper review should take longer than writing it yourself, because you need to know the correct solution, understand the proposed solution, and evaluate the difference between the two. When designing it yourself, you just need to know the correct solution and write it, and with modern high-level languages and IDEs with autocomplete writing it is hardly a bottleneck.
It is harder to solve a sudoku than verify a solution's correctness. I find similar benefits occasionally when coding with LLMs.
I disagree under the following circumstances, which in my experience is the common case: You don’t know from the outset all relevant considerations that go into implementing something. Coding yourself is an exploration process of those considerations. Being shown a finished solution doesn’t let you see and understand all the considerations and the possible options that you’d have contemplated when implementing it yourself. When reviewing, you still have to do that exploratory thinking to weigh the possible options. And the fact that you have to do that exploration purely mentally rather than in a process of working with code arguably makes it harder (similar to contemplating alternative solutions to a Sudoku purely mentally, actuallu).
There rarely is a single correct way of implementing some requirement or feature. It’s a trade-off between compromises, not binary correct or incorrect like a Sudoku puzzle. The insights that the exploration give you may even lead you to implement something significantly different from what you originally set out to.