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That's significantly more work (and effort) than just doing it yourself, though? Even for larger, complicated projects.

by kuschku 8mo ago

furyofantares 8mo ago
No it's not? Stuff like "divide the work up" is something you do when doing it yourself. Making a GUI prototype isn't really much work at all in the age of LLMs, akin to drawing up a few ideas on a notepad. Using git for small steps is something lots of people do for their own work and rebase later. Using extensive logging is mostly just something you have in your AGENTS.md for all your projects and forget about, similarly getting it setup to make and look at screenshots. What part of this is more work than doing it yourself?
- al_borland 8mo ago
  It’s more work in the same sense that trying to delegate a task to someone who doesn’t understand what needs to be done, and needs their hand held, is more work than doing it yourself. This is especially true when the vision is a little hazy and the path isn’t clear. When doing it yourself, you can make decisions in the moment, try things, pivot… when trying to delegate these things, it becomes a chore to try to clarify things that are inherently unclear, and pivot an idea when the person (or AI) being delegated to doesn’t fully grasp the pivot and keeps bringing in old ideas. I think most people have had an experience trying to delegate a task, where it becomes so much work to wrangle the person, that they just do it themselves. I’ve run into this countless times. That’s how it feels to use AI.
  - furyofantares 8mo ago
    You can probably assume the person who suggested it isn't having the experience of it being more work to do that way.
cvwright 8mo ago
It’s really not. For anything substantial, the things that you do to manage an LLM are the same things that you should be doing to manage a team of human devs, even if the team is just yourself. Documentation. Comments. Writing a plan and/or a spec before you begin coding. Being smart with git commits and branches.
Jeremy1026 8mo ago
Not even close. A friend and I are working on an iOS game (a tower defense style game). We are writing 0 code ourselves. We both have a history of iOS development, he is still actively involved and I've move away from it in recent years. In about 2 weeks we have a functional game, 60 levels, 28 different types of enemies, a procedurally generated daily challenge mode, an infinity mode. Tower crafting and upgrades, an economy system in the game for pay for the upgrades. This likely would have taken us months to get to the point that we are at, it was playable on Day 2.
- MarleTangible 8mo ago
  Could you explain how a chat session progresses, with an example if possible?
  - Jeremy1026 8mo ago
    I start with what I want to build. In the initial prompt I provide an overview of what I want, and then some specifics. Last night I added an archive to the Daily Challenge mode, so if you missed a day's challenge you could go back and play it. This is what my initial prompt looked like: --- I'd like to add an archives mode to the daily challenge. This will allow players to complete any daily challenges they didn't attempt on the actual day. It will look like a calendar, with the dates in Green if it was played, and in white if not. The archive should only go back to January 30, 2026, the day the project started. Include a to do to change this date prior to release. Rewards for completing daily challenges via the archive should be 25% of the normal value. --- Claude Code then asked me a couple of clarifying questions before it harnessed the superpowers:writing-plans skill and generate a document to plan the work. The document it put together is viewable at https://gist.github.com/Jeremy1026/cee66bf6d4b67d9a527f6e30f5d8b1a6 https://gist.github.com/Jeremy1026/cee66bf6d4b67d9a527f6e30f... There were a couple of edits that I made to the document before I told it to implement. It then fired off a couple of agents to perform the tasks in parallel where possible. Once it finished I tested and it worked as I had hoped. But there was a couple of follow up things that would make it more intertwined with everything else going on around daily challenges. So I followed up with: --- lets give 1 cell for compelting an archived daily challenge --- And finally: --- Now that we are tracking completions, can we update the notification to complete daily mission to include "Keep your X day streak" ---

That's significantly more work (and effort) than just doing it yourself, though? Even for larger, complicated projects.

by kuschku 8mo ago

That's significantly more work (and effort) than just doing it yourself, though? Even for larger, complicated projects.

No it's not? Stuff like "divide the work up" is something you do when doing it yourself. Making a GUI prototype isn't really much work at all in the age of LLMs, akin to drawing up a few ideas on a notepad. Using git for small steps is something lots of people do for their own work and rebase later. Using extensive logging is mostly just something you have in your AGENTS.md for all your projects and forget about, similarly getting it setup to make and look at screenshots. What part of this is more work than doing it yourself?

al_borland 8mo ago
It’s more work in the same sense that trying to delegate a task to someone who doesn’t understand what needs to be done, and needs their hand held, is more work than doing it yourself. This is especially true when the vision is a little hazy and the path isn’t clear. When doing it yourself, you can make decisions in the moment, try things, pivot… when trying to delegate these things, it becomes a chore to try to clarify things that are inherently unclear, and pivot an idea when the person (or AI) being delegated to doesn’t fully grasp the pivot and keeps bringing in old ideas. I think most people have had an experience trying to delegate a task, where it becomes so much work to wrangle the person, that they just do it themselves. I’ve run into this countless times. That’s how it feels to use AI.
- furyofantares 8mo ago
  You can probably assume the person who suggested it isn't having the experience of it being more work to do that way.

cvwright 8mo ago

It’s really not. For anything substantial, the things that you do to manage an LLM are the same things that you should be doing to manage a team of human devs, even if the team is just yourself. Documentation. Comments. Writing a plan and/or a spec before you begin coding. Being smart with git commits and branches.

Jeremy1026 8mo ago

Not even close. A friend and I are working on an iOS game (a tower defense style game). We are writing 0 code ourselves. We both have a history of iOS development, he is still actively involved and I've move away from it in recent years. In about 2 weeks we have a functional game, 60 levels, 28 different types of enemies, a procedurally generated daily challenge mode, an infinity mode. Tower crafting and upgrades, an economy system in the game for pay for the upgrades. This likely would have taken us months to get to the point that we are at, it was playable on Day 2.

MarleTangible 8mo ago
Could you explain how a chat session progresses, with an example if possible?
- Jeremy1026 8mo ago
  I start with what I want to build. In the initial prompt I provide an overview of what I want, and then some specifics. Last night I added an archive to the Daily Challenge mode, so if you missed a day's challenge you could go back and play it. This is what my initial prompt looked like: --- I'd like to add an archives mode to the daily challenge. This will allow players to complete any daily challenges they didn't attempt on the actual day. It will look like a calendar, with the dates in Green if it was played, and in white if not. The archive should only go back to January 30, 2026, the day the project started. Include a to do to change this date prior to release. Rewards for completing daily challenges via the archive should be 25% of the normal value. --- Claude Code then asked me a couple of clarifying questions before it harnessed the superpowers:writing-plans skill and generate a document to plan the work. The document it put together is viewable at https://gist.github.com/Jeremy1026/cee66bf6d4b67d9a527f6e30f5d8b1a6 https://gist.github.com/Jeremy1026/cee66bf6d4b67d9a527f6e30f... There were a couple of edits that I made to the document before I told it to implement. It then fired off a couple of agents to perform the tasks in parallel where possible. Once it finished I tested and it worked as I had hoped. But there was a couple of follow up things that would make it more intertwined with everything else going on around daily challenges. So I followed up with: --- lets give 1 cell for compelting an archived daily challenge --- And finally: --- Now that we are tracking completions, can we update the notification to complete daily mission to include "Keep your X day streak" ---