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Automating myself out of development
- thegrim33 3mo ago"Automating Myself Out of Development" .. "I’m neither an AI-fanatic" Clicks through bio, clicks into their linkedin .. wow, who could have ever guessed .. they're the CTO at an AI company whose sole product is trying to replace workers with AI solutions. Who could have ever guessed? That the person writing a personal blog post about how they're not an AI fanatic and how they can automate their work using AI tools .. is the CTO at an AI company selling products that do exactly that? Wow, what a coincidence. Surely this blog post contains a purely objective, impartial analysis of the topic.
- nisabek 3mo agoI'm not some evil spy trying to make everyone use AI... both the startup and the blogpost are an experiment, a work in progress that I'm sharing I don't think anyone would read my blog and be like "Oh, now I need a tool for my SRE to automate incident management" People are starved for real life examples, this is a real life example. of course I'm not objective. To be objective you'd need to make a large scale study among thousands of companies. I'm sorry I don't have resources for that... just trying to get other people's feedback
- ProllyInfamous 3mo agoI'm in general more supportive of others' comments within this article... but I'm still glad your research/tone is posted here, too. Nobody is entirely correct/wrong about the coming Future changes. Nobody knows what is reasonably believable, anymore...
- noelwelsh 3mo agoI 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.
- nullbio 3mo agoIt's great for people who are just maintaining something. Less so for someone building something from scratch, in the earlier phases.
- properbrew 3mo agoI used LLMs to develop Whistle Enterprise (https://whistle-enterprise.com 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.
- ryaniscool 3mo agoI 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.
- andai 3mo agon=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 hard, so he just does it.
- dmortin 3mo agoIs 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.)
- yieldcrv 3mo agoI 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 open and closed source concoctions and being more effective But its effective enough that I don’t need OP’s final form state of still approving everything Auto-mode is fine. Worktrees are built into Claude Code now. I just tell it to classify tickets as sequential or parallel possible and spawn subagents to tackle all of the tickets in the todo list They all get their own context window its pretty perfect now in the meantime I work in a couple tabs of Claude Design for different flows of any client side app. My philosophy has been that devs could pick up graphic and UI/UX design easily, its just still a full time job to make variations of layouts and portray their states. UI/UX is not a full time job anymore. And I use Claude chat to flesh out aspects of the overall idea I think you may be overcomplicating your workflow in the concluding state. Overall I agree that planning and intention is now most of the time, before a 10 subagent precision strike is initiated
- thi2 3mo agoThere are tons of people, those are just not as vocal.
- nisabek 3mo agoCould 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?..
- yieldcrv 3mo agoI 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
- ai_fry_ur_brain 3mo ago
- brcmthrowaway 3mo agoMore Yegge tier psychosis.
- lofaszvanitt 3mo agoExactly.
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- gnunicorn 3mo agoInterestingly, 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 PRs, if that total 5-6k lines is not a 5min job. Even if I brainstormed and set the plan, that's really the part that doesn't scale right now for me in this. But the author is very shy about that: either the changes arent that big in the end or they trust the process enough to review in a more casual manner. Being equally untrusting I can't do that ...
- strogonoff 3mo agoProper 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.
- minihat 3mo agoIt is harder to solve a sudoku than verify a solution's correctness. I find similar benefits occasionally when coding with LLMs.
- skydhash 3mo agoSudoku’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.
- layer8 3mo agoI 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.
- pydry 3mo ago>Automating myself out of development >I want to start by saying that I’m neither an AI-fanatic Kind of like saying you are a fanatic before saying you aren't. I don't think theres too much here (e.g. "spec driven development") I haven't seen elsewhere.
- classified 3mo ago> I don't think theres too much here I haven't seen elsewhere. Isn't that the rhyme here. I can't think of any article or discussion on AI here that contains anything new or noteworthy. And yet all those articles we've read before and all those "discussions" we've had before keep coming and coming. I have gotten bored and I'm just waiting for anything decisive to happen.
- general1465 3mo agoI 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 of every LLM. Sure you can recreate an application which exists in thousand of variations on the internet, but the moment you will try to go more into domain knowledge you will start struggling more and more. Try to make CAN driver for ESP32, easy it is probably going to work. Try to make CAN driver for STM32F7xx now the AI will start having a problem but probably will be able to produce something what is working after a lot of debugging. Now let's make CAN driver for MPC5555. AI will start writing fairy tales about registers which do not exist. All of processor above have reference manuals and sometimes example git repositories available on open internet.
- abletonlive 3mo ago> All of processor above have reference manuals and sometimes example git repositories available on open internet. okay? then give those reference manuals and git repositories? I haven't heard something know LLMs can't get around and figure out?
- bonoboTP 3mo agoDid 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.
- general1465 3mo agoI did, the problem is that 1. There can be massive differences between chips which sounds plausibly same and thanks to the way how LLM is working, models are mangling these variations together 2. Registers are often named in very way similar across different manufacturers so models are making up registers in MPC5555 which are coincidentally registers in Renesas processors doing same thing. 3. There are no standard in reference manuals, sometimes there are literally missing chunks of knowledge thanks to translation to English or there are pieces which you can only get from Application Notes which has code as a screenshot. And then you will find out that all those descriptions are wrong and through trial and error you will get it working in 2 weeks time. Bonus point: Random people having public Git repositories for obscure processors, but with bad or completely non working implementation of drivers for them. However LLM will just output variation of this garbage on you, because there are 3 public repositories on the whole internet. Sometimes I have a feeling that this must be on purpose to poison the well.
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- 2001zhaozhao 3mo agoGood 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.
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- saint-evan 3mo ago*siiiighhh... Slop automation. Removing self from loop, automating brainstorming. It's madness. No way that code is any good, shippable beyond 2 users or even maintainable beyond auto-slapping on more slop. Sad.