4 ms·

> Like, is there truly an agentic way to go 10x or is there some catch? Yes. I think it’s practice. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I feel like I have reach

by adriand 10mo ago

> Like, is there truly an agentic way to go 10x or is there some catch? Yes. I think it’s practice. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I feel like I have reached a kind of mind meld state with my AI tooling, specifically Claude Code. I am not really consciously aware of having learned anything related to these processes, but I have been all in on this since ChatGPT, and I honestly think my brain has been rewired in a way that I don’t truly perceive except in terms of the rate of software production. There was a period of several months a while ago where I felt exhausted all the time. I was getting a lot done, but there was something about the experience that was incredibly draining. Now I am past that and I have gone to this new plateau of ridiculous productivity, and a kind of addictive joy in the work. A marvellous pleasure at the orchestration of complex tasks and seeing the results play out. It’s pure magic. Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous and over-the-top. But I haven’t had this much fun writing software since my 20s.

r_lee 10mo ago
That's really interesting. May I ask what kinds of projects, stack and any kind of markdown magic you use? And any specific workflow? And are there times when you have to step in manually?
- adriand 10mo ago
  Currently three main projects. Two are Rails back-ends and React front-ends, so they are all Ruby, Typescript, Tailwind, etc. The third is more recent, it's an audio plugin built using the JUCE framework, it is all C++. This is the one that has been blowing my mind the most because I am an expert web developer, but the last time I wrote a line of C++ was 20 years ago, and I have zero DSP or math skills. What blows my mind is that it works great, it's thread safe and performant. In terms of workflow, I have a bunch of custom commands for tasks that I do frequently (e.g. "perform code review"), but I'm very much in the loop all the time. The whole "agent can code for hours at a time" thing is not something I personally believe. It depends on the task how involved I get, however. Sometimes I'm happy to just let it do work and then review afterwards. Other times, I will watch it code and interrupt it if I am unhappy with the direction. So yes, I am constantly stepping in manually. This is what I meant about "mind meld". The agent is not doing the work, I am not doing the work, WE are doing the work.
  - efields 10mo ago
    I maintain a few rails apps and Claude Code has written 95% of the code for the last 4 months. I deploy regularly. I make my own PRs then have Copilot review them. Sometimes it finds criticisms, and I copy and paste that chunk of critique into Claude Code, and it fixes it. Treat the LLMs like junior devs that can lookup answers supernaturally fast. You still need to be mindful of their work. Doubtful even. Test, test, test.
    - lomase 10mo ago
      Can we see any of this software created by this amazing LLMs?
  - timeon 10mo ago
    Why do you need to use Tailwind if the code is generated? Can't there be something more efficient?
    - Deegy 10mo ago
      Extensive tailwind training data in the models. Sure there's something more efficient but it's just safer to let the model leverage what it was trained on.
      - camdenreslink 10mo ago
        Surely there is an order of magnitude more training data on plain CSS than tailwind, right?
        frikk 10mo ago
        In my experience the LLMs work better with frameworks that have more rigid guidance. Something like Tailwind has a body of examples that work together, language to reason about the behavior needed, higher levels of abstraction (potentially), etc. This seems to be helpful. The LLMs can certainly use raw CSS and it works well, the challenge is when you need consistent framing across many pages with mounting special cases, and the LLMs may make extrapolate small inconsistencies further. If you stick within a rigid framework, the inconsistencies should be less across a larger project (in theory, at least).
- itgoon 10mo ago
  Research -> Plan -> Implement Start by having the agent ask you questions until it has enough information to create a plan. Use the agent to create the plan. Follow the plan. When I started, I had to look at the code pretty frequently. Rather than fix it myself, I spent time thinking about what I could change in my prompts or workflow.
mrwrong 10mo ago
> Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous and over-the-top. in that case you should come with more data. tell us how you measured your productivity improvement. all you've said here is that it makes you feel good
- adriand 10mo ago
  Work that would have taken me 1-2 weeks to complete, I can now get done in 2-3 hours. That's not an exaggeration. I have another friend who is as all-in on this as me and he works in a company (I work for myself, as a solo contractor for clients), and he told me that he moved on to Q1 2026 projects because he'd completed all the work slated for 2025, weeks ahead of schedule. Meanwhile his colleagues are still wading through scrum meetings. I realize that this all sounds kind of religious: you don't know what you're missing until you actually accept Jesus's love, or something along those lines. But you do have to kinda just go all-in to have this experience. I don't know what else to say about it.
  - beepbooptheory 10mo ago
    My sympathies go out to the friend's coworkers. They are probably wading through a bunch of stuff right now, but given the context you have given us, its probably not "scrum meetings".. I don't even care about the llm, I just want the confidence you have to assess that any given thing will take N weeks. You say 1-2 weeks.. thats like a big range! Something that "would" take 1 week takes ~2 hours, something that "would" take 2 weeks also takes ~2 hours. How does that even make sense? I wonder how long something that would of taken three weeks would take? Do you still charge your clients the same?
    - adriand 10mo ago
      > They are probably wading through a bunch of stuff right now, but given the context you have given us, its probably not "scrum meetings".. This made me laugh. Fair enough. ;) In terms of the time estimations: if your point is that I don't have hard data to back up my assertions, you're absolutely correct. I was always terrible at estimating how long something would take. I'm still terrible at it. But I agree with the OP. I think the labour required is down 90%. It does feel to me that we're getting into religious believer territory. There are those who have firsthand experience and are all-in (the believers), there are those who have firsthand experience and don't get it (the faithless), and there are those who haven't tried it (the atheists). It's hard to communicate across those divides, and each group's view of the others is essentially, "I don't understand you".
newsoftheday 10mo ago
> Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous and over-the-top. But I haven’t had this much fun writing software since my 20s. But...you're not writing it. The culmination of many sites, many people, Stack Overflow, etc. all wrote it through the filtering mechanism being called AI. You didn't write a damn thing.
- dent9 10mo ago
  Lol that's like saying that because you found the solution on stack overflow you didn't write the program News flash buddy: YOU never wrote any code yourself either. Literally every single line of code you've ever committed to a repo was first written by someone else and you just copied it and modified it a little.

by adriand 10mo ago

r_lee 10mo ago

That's really interesting. May I ask what kinds of projects, stack and any kind of markdown magic you use? And any specific workflow? And are there times when you have to step in manually?

adriand 10mo ago
Currently three main projects. Two are Rails back-ends and React front-ends, so they are all Ruby, Typescript, Tailwind, etc. The third is more recent, it's an audio plugin built using the JUCE framework, it is all C++. This is the one that has been blowing my mind the most because I am an expert web developer, but the last time I wrote a line of C++ was 20 years ago, and I have zero DSP or math skills. What blows my mind is that it works great, it's thread safe and performant. In terms of workflow, I have a bunch of custom commands for tasks that I do frequently (e.g. "perform code review"), but I'm very much in the loop all the time. The whole "agent can code for hours at a time" thing is not something I personally believe. It depends on the task how involved I get, however. Sometimes I'm happy to just let it do work and then review afterwards. Other times, I will watch it code and interrupt it if I am unhappy with the direction. So yes, I am constantly stepping in manually. This is what I meant about "mind meld". The agent is not doing the work, I am not doing the work, WE are doing the work.
- efields 10mo ago
  I maintain a few rails apps and Claude Code has written 95% of the code for the last 4 months. I deploy regularly. I make my own PRs then have Copilot review them. Sometimes it finds criticisms, and I copy and paste that chunk of critique into Claude Code, and it fixes it. Treat the LLMs like junior devs that can lookup answers supernaturally fast. You still need to be mindful of their work. Doubtful even. Test, test, test.
  - lomase 10mo ago
    Can we see any of this software created by this amazing LLMs?
- timeon 10mo ago
  Why do you need to use Tailwind if the code is generated? Can't there be something more efficient?
  - Deegy 10mo ago
    Extensive tailwind training data in the models. Sure there's something more efficient but it's just safer to let the model leverage what it was trained on.
    - camdenreslink 10mo ago
      Surely there is an order of magnitude more training data on plain CSS than tailwind, right?
      - frikk 10mo ago
        In my experience the LLMs work better with frameworks that have more rigid guidance. Something like Tailwind has a body of examples that work together, language to reason about the behavior needed, higher levels of abstraction (potentially), etc. This seems to be helpful. The LLMs can certainly use raw CSS and it works well, the challenge is when you need consistent framing across many pages with mounting special cases, and the LLMs may make extrapolate small inconsistencies further. If you stick within a rigid framework, the inconsistencies should be less across a larger project (in theory, at least).
itgoon 10mo ago
Research -> Plan -> Implement Start by having the agent ask you questions until it has enough information to create a plan. Use the agent to create the plan. Follow the plan. When I started, I had to look at the code pretty frequently. Rather than fix it myself, I spent time thinking about what I could change in my prompts or workflow.

mrwrong 10mo ago

> Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous and over-the-top. in that case you should come with more data. tell us how you measured your productivity improvement. all you've said here is that it makes you feel good

adriand 10mo ago
Work that would have taken me 1-2 weeks to complete, I can now get done in 2-3 hours. That's not an exaggeration. I have another friend who is as all-in on this as me and he works in a company (I work for myself, as a solo contractor for clients), and he told me that he moved on to Q1 2026 projects because he'd completed all the work slated for 2025, weeks ahead of schedule. Meanwhile his colleagues are still wading through scrum meetings. I realize that this all sounds kind of religious: you don't know what you're missing until you actually accept Jesus's love, or something along those lines. But you do have to kinda just go all-in to have this experience. I don't know what else to say about it.
- beepbooptheory 10mo ago
  My sympathies go out to the friend's coworkers. They are probably wading through a bunch of stuff right now, but given the context you have given us, its probably not "scrum meetings".. I don't even care about the llm, I just want the confidence you have to assess that any given thing will take N weeks. You say 1-2 weeks.. thats like a big range! Something that "would" take 1 week takes ~2 hours, something that "would" take 2 weeks also takes ~2 hours. How does that even make sense? I wonder how long something that would of taken three weeks would take? Do you still charge your clients the same?
  - adriand 10mo ago
    > They are probably wading through a bunch of stuff right now, but given the context you have given us, its probably not "scrum meetings".. This made me laugh. Fair enough. ;) In terms of the time estimations: if your point is that I don't have hard data to back up my assertions, you're absolutely correct. I was always terrible at estimating how long something would take. I'm still terrible at it. But I agree with the OP. I think the labour required is down 90%. It does feel to me that we're getting into religious believer territory. There are those who have firsthand experience and are all-in (the believers), there are those who have firsthand experience and don't get it (the faithless), and there are those who haven't tried it (the atheists). It's hard to communicate across those divides, and each group's view of the others is essentially, "I don't understand you".

newsoftheday 10mo ago

> Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous and over-the-top. But I haven’t had this much fun writing software since my 20s. But...you're not writing it. The culmination of many sites, many people, Stack Overflow, etc. all wrote it through the filtering mechanism being called AI. You didn't write a damn thing.

dent9 10mo ago
Lol that's like saying that because you found the solution on stack overflow you didn't write the program News flash buddy: YOU never wrote any code yourself either. Literally every single line of code you've ever committed to a repo was first written by someone else and you just copied it and modified it a little.