6 ms·
Useful pointers, which match my experience well when trying this out. The one big question that springs to my mind is: when you've done all these steps, how muc
by OrderlyTiamat 9mo ago
Useful pointers, which match my experience well when trying this out. The one big question that springs to my mind is: when you've done all these steps, how much time did you really save?
You've chosen a strategy, broke down the solution into small easy to code parts, validated business logic, noted traps to avoid, searched for all relevant code, set up a context packing document particular to this section of the code base, experimented with multiple agents, reviewed each version of the code to see if you understand it-
That sounds like a lot of work!
And why, so the AI can do the last 10% of actually coding it up? Is there even a speedup here over doing it yourself? There's some evidence against AI speedups [1]. Of course some of these steps are themselves AI enhanced, and some of them are part of the work regardless of whether you use AI.
I still feel skeptical on this workflow and how big the gains could possibly be. I feel more for the alternate approach of writing it yourself, but using the AI for the boring parts (e.g. copy this section, but use those functions), or for sparring / research. I have however no data to show which approach takes less time.
I can however tell you from experimenting with full on vibe coding- you can do it with half the attention you'd give the task yourself. Is that what I'm gaining, that I can read a book during code generation? (https://xkcd.com/303/ https://xkcd.com/303/)
[1] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...