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I'm working on a bunch of different projects trying out new stuff all the time for the past six months. Every time I do something I add another layer of AI aut

I'm working on a bunch of different projects trying out new stuff all the time for the past six months. Every time I do something I add another layer of AI automation/enhancement to my personal dev setup with the goal of trying to see how much I can extend my own ability to produce while delivering high quality projects. I definitely wouldn't say I'm 10x of what I could do before across the board but a solid 2-3x average. In some respects like testing, it's perhaps 10x because having proper test coverage is essential to being able to let agentic AI run by itself in a git worktree without fearing that it will fuck everything up. I do dream of a scenario where I could have a company that's equivalent to 100 or 1000 people with just a small team of close friends and trusted coworkers that are all using this kind of tooling. I think the feeling of small companies is just better and more intimate and suits me more than expanding and growing by hiring.

charliebwrites 1y ago
> Every time I do something I add another layer of AI automation/enhancement to my personal dev setup with the goal of trying to see how much I can extend my own ability to produce while delivering high quality projects Can you give some examples? What’s worked well?
- jprokay13 1y ago
  If you haven’t, adding in strict(er) linting rules is an easy win. Enforcing documentation for public methods is a great one imo. The more you can do to tell the AI what you want via a “code-lint-test” loop, the better the results.
  - crgwbr 1y ago
    Honestly the same is true for human devs. As frustrating as strict linting can be for newer devs, it’s way less frustrating than having all the same issues pointed out in code review. That’s interesting because I’ve been finding that all sorts of stuff that’s good for AI is actually good for humans too, linting, fast easy to run tests, standardized code layouts, etc. Humans just have more ability to adapt to oddities at the moment, which leads to slack.
    - jprokay13 1y ago
      Yeah I find it pretty funny that so much of us (myself included) threw out strict documentation practices because “the code should be self documenting!” Now I want as much of it as I can get.
    - jaggederest 1y ago
      My rule of thumb is that if I get a nit, whitespace, or syntax preferences as a PR comment, that goes into the linter. Especially for systemic issues like e.g. not awaiting functions that return a promise, any kind of alphabetization, import styles, etc.
- malux85 1y ago
  For us it’s been auto-generating tests - we focus efforts on having the LLM write 1 test, manually verifying it. Then use this as context and tell the llm to extend to all space groups and crystal systems. So we get code coverage without all the effort, it works well for well defined problems that can be verified with test.
- haiku2077 1y ago
  - Extremely strict linting and formatting rules for every language you use in a project. Including JSON, YAML, SQL. - Using AI code gen to make your own dev tools to automate tasks. Everything from "I need a make target to automate updating my staging and production config files when I make certain types of changes" or "make an ETL to clean up this dirty database" to "make a codegen tool to automatically generate library functions from the types I have defined" and "generate a polished CLI for this API for me" - Using Tilt (tilt.dev) to automatically rebuild and live-reload software on a running Kubernetes cluster within seconds. Essentially, deploy-on-save. - Much more expansive and robust integration test suites with output such that an AI agent can automatically run integration tests, read the errors and use them to iterate. And with some guidance it can write more tests based on a small set of examples. It's also been great at adding formatted messages to every test assertion to make failed tests easier to understand - Using an editor where an AI agent has access to the language server, linter, etc. via diagnostics to automatically understand when it makes severe mistakes and fix them A lot of this is traditional programming but sped up so that things that took hours a few years ago now take literally minutes.
  - handfuloflight 1y ago
    Even things that took days or weeks are being done in minutes now. And a few hours on top to ensure correctness.
  - jay_kyburz 1y ago
    I worry that once I've done all that I won't have time for my actual work. I also have to investigate all these new AI editors, and sign up for the API's and work out which is best, then I have to learn how to prompt properly. I worry that messing with the AI is the equivalent of tweaking my colour schemes and choosing new fonts.
    - cartoonfoxes 1y ago
      Some of what I learned from a decade of keeping up with the perfusion of JS libraries and frameworks seems relevant to AI: - anything with good enough adoption is good enough (unless I'm an SME to judge directly) - build something with it before considering a switch - they're similar enough that what I learn in one will transfer to others - everything sucks compared with 2-3 years from now; switching between "sucks" and "sucks+" will look silly in retrospect
teaearlgraycold 1y ago
Definitely agree small teams are the way to go. The bigger the company the more cognitive dissonance is imposed on the employees. I need to work where everyone is forced to engage with reality and those that don’t are fired.
- MoonGhost 1y ago
  The thing is the luck as usually on the side of bigger battalions. Smaller teams don't have the rich and width of bigger companies. All in all we need the full spectrum from single person startup to mega corporations.
  - teaearlgraycold 1y ago
    Some people like working for big companies so this is fine. It’s a shame that outside of Silicon Valley there isn’t a high density of small software companies.
ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
Instagram was 13 employees before they were purchased by Facebook. The secret is most employees in a 1000 person company don't need to be there or cover very niche cases that your company likely wouldn't have.
- WJW 1y ago
  Don't fall for the lottery winner bias. Some companies just strike it rich, often for reasons entirely outside their control. That doesn't mean that copying their methods will lead to the same results.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    And for enterprise sales, you need a salesforce and many multi-billion companies have an enterprise salesforce. And documentation writers, and support staff, in multiple geographies, and events/marketing teams to support customers, etc.
    - re-thc 1y ago
      > you need a salesforce That's a cloud subscription away!
      - ghaff 1y ago
        Except it's not. All the big cloud providers catering to enterprises, whether SaaS or AWS/Google/Azure, definitely have large sales forces whether or not they thought they needed them at first or not.
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    In comic form: https://xkcd.com/1827/ https://xkcd.com/1827/
- sien 1y ago
  YouTube had fewer than 70 employees when Google bought them in 2006. With a good idea and good execution teams can be impressively small.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
A while back, someone here linked to this story[0]. It's a bit simplified and idealized, but is actually fairly spot-on. I have been using AI every day. Just today, I used ChatGPT to translate an app string into 5 languages. [0] https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/superhuman-what-can-ai-do-in-30-minutes https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/superhuman-what-can-ai-do-i...
- stephen_g 1y ago
  Hopefully it’s better for individual strings, but I’ve heard a few native speakers of other languages (who also can speak English) complaining about websites now serving up AI-translated versions of articles by default. They are better than Google Translate of old, but apparently still bad enough that they’d much rather just be served the English original… I guess similar to my experience with the AI voice translation YouTube has, I’ve felt similar - I’d rather listen to the original voice but with translated subtitles than a fake voice.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    Exactly. I wouldn't use it for bulk translations. This was literally, 4 words. What was useful, was that I could explain exactly what the context was, in both a technical and usability context, and it understood it enough to provide appropriate translations. UPDATE: I went and verified it. The translation was absolutely perfect. Not sure what this means for translation services, but it certainly saved me several hundred dollars, and several days, just to add one label prompt to a free app.
  - eCa 1y ago
    > they’d much rather just be served the English original Yes. And the sites that gives me a poorly translated text (which may or may not be translated by ai) with no means to switch to English is an immediate back-button. Usually, and especially technical articles, poor/unreadable translations are identifiable within a few words. If the text seems like it could be interesting, I spend more time searching for the in-english button then I spent reading the text.
  - deleted 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
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eloisant 1y ago
That's not really new, the small teams in the 2000's with web frameworks like Rails were able to do as a team of 5 what needed a 50 people team in the 90's. Or even as a week-end solo project. What happened it that it because the new norm, and the window were you could charge the work of 50 people for a team of 5 was short. Some teams cut the prices to gain marketshare and we were back to usual revenue per employee. At some point nobody thought of a CRUD app with a web UI as a big project. It's probably what will happen here (if AI does gives the same productivity boost as langages with memory management and web frameworks): soon your company with a small team of friends will not be seen by anyone as equivalent to 100 or 1000 people, even if you can achieve the same thing of a company that size a few years earlier.
- MoonGhost 1y ago
  That's what Amazon is doing. They simply increase the output norm and promise mass layoffs again. MS promises too, I'm not sure about details, but likely they don't cut the projects. Which means use of some sort of copilot is expected now. The question is what happens to developers. Will they quit the industry or move to smaller companies?
SwtCyber 1y ago
The "small but mighty" team model feels way more appealing to me too - less management overhead, more actual building
vachina 1y ago
At some point you'll lose that edge because you stop being able to differentiate yourself. If you can x10 with agents, others can too. AI will let you reach the "higher" low hanging fruits.
- owebmaster 1y ago
  Same thing as before, some people will x100 with agents while most will at maximum x10.
- mensetmanusman 1y ago
  Using agents is the new skill. AI will always be chasing a tail where some are 10-100x more efficient at using the tool chain as others.

charliebwrites 1y ago

> Every time I do something I add another layer of AI automation/enhancement to my personal dev setup with the goal of trying to see how much I can extend my own ability to produce while delivering high quality projects Can you give some examples? What’s worked well?

jprokay13 1y ago
If you haven’t, adding in strict(er) linting rules is an easy win. Enforcing documentation for public methods is a great one imo. The more you can do to tell the AI what you want via a “code-lint-test” loop, the better the results.
- crgwbr 1y ago
  Honestly the same is true for human devs. As frustrating as strict linting can be for newer devs, it’s way less frustrating than having all the same issues pointed out in code review. That’s interesting because I’ve been finding that all sorts of stuff that’s good for AI is actually good for humans too, linting, fast easy to run tests, standardized code layouts, etc. Humans just have more ability to adapt to oddities at the moment, which leads to slack.
  - jprokay13 1y ago
    Yeah I find it pretty funny that so much of us (myself included) threw out strict documentation practices because “the code should be self documenting!” Now I want as much of it as I can get.
  - jaggederest 1y ago
    My rule of thumb is that if I get a nit, whitespace, or syntax preferences as a PR comment, that goes into the linter. Especially for systemic issues like e.g. not awaiting functions that return a promise, any kind of alphabetization, import styles, etc.
malux85 1y ago
For us it’s been auto-generating tests - we focus efforts on having the LLM write 1 test, manually verifying it. Then use this as context and tell the llm to extend to all space groups and crystal systems. So we get code coverage without all the effort, it works well for well defined problems that can be verified with test.
haiku2077 1y ago
- Extremely strict linting and formatting rules for every language you use in a project. Including JSON, YAML, SQL. - Using AI code gen to make your own dev tools to automate tasks. Everything from "I need a make target to automate updating my staging and production config files when I make certain types of changes" or "make an ETL to clean up this dirty database" to "make a codegen tool to automatically generate library functions from the types I have defined" and "generate a polished CLI for this API for me" - Using Tilt (tilt.dev) to automatically rebuild and live-reload software on a running Kubernetes cluster within seconds. Essentially, deploy-on-save. - Much more expansive and robust integration test suites with output such that an AI agent can automatically run integration tests, read the errors and use them to iterate. And with some guidance it can write more tests based on a small set of examples. It's also been great at adding formatted messages to every test assertion to make failed tests easier to understand - Using an editor where an AI agent has access to the language server, linter, etc. via diagnostics to automatically understand when it makes severe mistakes and fix them A lot of this is traditional programming but sped up so that things that took hours a few years ago now take literally minutes.
- handfuloflight 1y ago
  Even things that took days or weeks are being done in minutes now. And a few hours on top to ensure correctness.
- jay_kyburz 1y ago
  I worry that once I've done all that I won't have time for my actual work. I also have to investigate all these new AI editors, and sign up for the API's and work out which is best, then I have to learn how to prompt properly. I worry that messing with the AI is the equivalent of tweaking my colour schemes and choosing new fonts.
  - cartoonfoxes 1y ago
    Some of what I learned from a decade of keeping up with the perfusion of JS libraries and frameworks seems relevant to AI: - anything with good enough adoption is good enough (unless I'm an SME to judge directly) - build something with it before considering a switch - they're similar enough that what I learn in one will transfer to others - everything sucks compared with 2-3 years from now; switching between "sucks" and "sucks+" will look silly in retrospect

teaearlgraycold 1y ago

Definitely agree small teams are the way to go. The bigger the company the more cognitive dissonance is imposed on the employees. I need to work where everyone is forced to engage with reality and those that don’t are fired.

MoonGhost 1y ago
The thing is the luck as usually on the side of bigger battalions. Smaller teams don't have the rich and width of bigger companies. All in all we need the full spectrum from single person startup to mega corporations.
- teaearlgraycold 1y ago
  Some people like working for big companies so this is fine. It’s a shame that outside of Silicon Valley there isn’t a high density of small software companies.

ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago

Instagram was 13 employees before they were purchased by Facebook. The secret is most employees in a 1000 person company don't need to be there or cover very niche cases that your company likely wouldn't have.

WJW 1y ago
Don't fall for the lottery winner bias. Some companies just strike it rich, often for reasons entirely outside their control. That doesn't mean that copying their methods will lead to the same results.
- ghaff 1y ago
  And for enterprise sales, you need a salesforce and many multi-billion companies have an enterprise salesforce. And documentation writers, and support staff, in multiple geographies, and events/marketing teams to support customers, etc.
  - re-thc 1y ago
    > you need a salesforce That's a cloud subscription away!
    - ghaff 1y ago
      Except it's not. All the big cloud providers catering to enterprises, whether SaaS or AWS/Google/Azure, definitely have large sales forces whether or not they thought they needed them at first or not.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  In comic form: https://xkcd.com/1827/ https://xkcd.com/1827/
sien 1y ago
YouTube had fewer than 70 employees when Google bought them in 2006. With a good idea and good execution teams can be impressively small.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

A while back, someone here linked to this story[0]. It's a bit simplified and idealized, but is actually fairly spot-on. I have been using AI every day. Just today, I used ChatGPT to translate an app string into 5 languages. [0] https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/superhuman-what-can-ai-do-in-30-minutes https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/superhuman-what-can-ai-do-i...

stephen_g 1y ago
Hopefully it’s better for individual strings, but I’ve heard a few native speakers of other languages (who also can speak English) complaining about websites now serving up AI-translated versions of articles by default. They are better than Google Translate of old, but apparently still bad enough that they’d much rather just be served the English original… I guess similar to my experience with the AI voice translation YouTube has, I’ve felt similar - I’d rather listen to the original voice but with translated subtitles than a fake voice.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  Exactly. I wouldn't use it for bulk translations. This was literally, 4 words. What was useful, was that I could explain exactly what the context was, in both a technical and usability context, and it understood it enough to provide appropriate translations. UPDATE: I went and verified it. The translation was absolutely perfect. Not sure what this means for translation services, but it certainly saved me several hundred dollars, and several days, just to add one label prompt to a free app.
- eCa 1y ago
  > they’d much rather just be served the English original Yes. And the sites that gives me a poorly translated text (which may or may not be translated by ai) with no means to switch to English is an immediate back-button. Usually, and especially technical articles, poor/unreadable translations are identifiable within a few words. If the text seems like it could be interesting, I spend more time searching for the in-english button then I spent reading the text.
- deleted 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

eloisant 1y ago

That's not really new, the small teams in the 2000's with web frameworks like Rails were able to do as a team of 5 what needed a 50 people team in the 90's. Or even as a week-end solo project. What happened it that it because the new norm, and the window were you could charge the work of 50 people for a team of 5 was short. Some teams cut the prices to gain marketshare and we were back to usual revenue per employee. At some point nobody thought of a CRUD app with a web UI as a big project. It's probably what will happen here (if AI does gives the same productivity boost as langages with memory management and web frameworks): soon your company with a small team of friends will not be seen by anyone as equivalent to 100 or 1000 people, even if you can achieve the same thing of a company that size a few years earlier.

MoonGhost 1y ago
That's what Amazon is doing. They simply increase the output norm and promise mass layoffs again. MS promises too, I'm not sure about details, but likely they don't cut the projects. Which means use of some sort of copilot is expected now. The question is what happens to developers. Will they quit the industry or move to smaller companies?

SwtCyber 1y ago

The "small but mighty" team model feels way more appealing to me too - less management overhead, more actual building

vachina 1y ago

At some point you'll lose that edge because you stop being able to differentiate yourself. If you can x10 with agents, others can too. AI will let you reach the "higher" low hanging fruits.

owebmaster 1y ago
Same thing as before, some people will x100 with agents while most will at maximum x10.
mensetmanusman 1y ago
Using agents is the new skill. AI will always be chasing a tail where some are 10-100x more efficient at using the tool chain as others.