Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Automating myself out of development

thoughtfultechnologist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 97 posts

Re: Automating myself out of development

#51

Post by properbrew »

leguy wrote: post #45
properbrew wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

neat. I saw the "no bot joins the call". Is it obvious to others in the virtual meeting that you are using this tool?

Thank you! No they cannot tell. It is your requirement as per the laws of your country to notify the other party if you're going to use it.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#52

Post by ai_fry_ur_brain »

yieldcrv wrote: post #32
ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exam…

Lmao claude design sucks ass. You have low standards.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#53

Post by iot_devs »

Swizec wrote: post #42
germanptr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get this question a lot, and I found it hard to answer briefly, so I ended up writing a longer post about how I work: https://www.trigosec.com/insights/mob-programming-for-one/ The short version is that I don’t let AI agents work unsupervised on my code. I treat them like participants in a mob programming session instead of autonomous developers. Different agents get different roles (implementer, reviewer, architec…

> We’re still missing a good way to express and measure architectural quality Architectural complexity[1]! There’s several really good papers on this. Unfortunately it never caught on and we don’t have great automated tools to spit out a number. Also the majority of people just don’t care enough. Research in this field kinda died out when we invented microservices and started treating those as a silver bullet to The…

> Also the majority of people just don’t care enough.

Yet! It is the next frontier and we will need it for having agent as described in the post to really work

Re: Automating myself out of development

#54

Post by dmortin »

andai wrote: post #22
ryanackley wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

n=1 but, a friend of mine spent the last few months working on an experimental music software with Claude. What he built is amazing and far beyond my abilities (I have been programming for 20 years). He doesn't know any programming. In fact, it's far beyond what I would even attempt, because I've just spent two decades building up a data bank of how hard things are supposed to be. He doesn't know it's supposed to be…

Is his code maintainable, though? Or is it just a pile of code which happens to work? What if he wants to change something? Does he generate again the whole thing from scratch? Or does he tell Claude to make the changes and doesn't even know when something breaks when a new thing is added? (Assuming the software is complex, having multiple non trivial features.)

Re: Automating myself out of development

#55

Post by bonoboTP »

general1465 wrote: post #23

I am completely calm regarding AI and development. First nobody sane want to give their domain IP to OpenAI/Anthropic. That's why local AI will eventually prevail and flourish because people who actually have some IP will have no problem to buy 10k+ EUR machine to run some pretty good models on it. However if your main job is just doing CRUD stuff, then you are screwed. Secondly hallucination is really Achilles heel…

Did you try this by giving it access to the materials? Human programmers also don't memorize all this stuff. If this is the reason for your calmness it's quite shortsighted.

There are problems when you rely too much on AI generated code, but these shallow dismissals are quite annoying.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#56

Post by rootusrootus »

amelius wrote: post #43
noelwelsh wrote: post #2

I 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 personally limit LLMs to single files only at the moment. Self-contained components. Using LLMs in a larger scope can sometimes work, but it has the real risk of turning a project into a mess after which you will have to undo the work and lose a lot of time. Also, using LLMs this way with less clear boundaries will make reading and maintaining the code more cumbersome.

I use this strategy, too. I liken it to limiting the blast radius. If the LLM truly fouls things up it’s easier to pick up the pieces if you keep the scope limited.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#57

Post by 2001zhaozhao »

Good writeup. I think the main difference in my workflow is that I skipped the sandboxing part and accepted the coding agent having access to the entire 24/7 dev machine, so I'm still running on worktrees. Also, the "idea enrich" steps in my workflow are less formal - I tend to write most details in a feature spec myself. I also do my workflow on my own self-hosted custom interface which comes with a kanban board for project tracking, so I don't need Github. The rest of the workflow looks pretty similar.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#58

Post by bluefirebrand »

yieldcrv wrote: post #3

I 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…

> control freak veteran developers who cant let go

It is not control freak behavior to want to be in control when you are the one accountable for it if it breaks.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#59

Post by zem »

noelwelsh wrote: post #2

I 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've been running claude in what the blog calls phase 0 for the last 6-7 months. i'm perfectly happy with it, my development velocity has increased while i still have a good grasp of the entire app, and i've actually been making decent progress with web development for a personal project, which is something i've bounced off several times in the past. also i do not get stuck as often on stuff like "how do i get django to statically serve up a js bundle with relative imports" which is more about knowing specific APIs of specific frameworks than any feature of my code or architecture.

i would not want to go down the "take myself out of the loop" path because yes, i do have to micromanage the claude session, often course-correcting every commit and then doing large scale refactoring every so often. but i'm perfectly happy doing that - i see claude as more of a tool than a coder i can hand work off to.

Re: Automating myself out of development

#60

Post by Swizec »

iot_devs wrote: post #53
Swizec wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We’re still missing a good way to express and measure architectural quality Architectural complexity[1]! There’s several really good papers on this. Unfortunately it never caught on and we don’t have great automated tools to spit out a number. Also the majority of people just don’t care enough. Research in this field kinda died out when we invented microservices and started treating those as a silver bullet to The…

> Also the majority of people just don’t care enough. Yet! It is the next frontier and we will need it for having agent as described in the post to really work

> Yet! It is the next frontier

While researching my book I read papers from the 80’s saying this. If you get a good enough spec and define the contracts and architecture, you then just hand off implementation to juniors/offshore/etc

So far has not worked. Maybe this time!

Post reply on HN