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> the workflow I’ve settled into is radically different from what most people do with AI coding tools This looks exactly like what anthropic recommends as the
by mvkel 8mo ago
> the workflow I’ve settled into is radically different from what most people do with AI coding tools
This looks exactly like what anthropic recommends as the best practice for using Claude Code. Textbook.
It also exposes a major downside of this approach: if you don't plan perfectly, you'll have to start over from scratch if anything goes wrong.
I've found a much better approach in doing a design -> plan -> execute in batches, where the plan is no more than 1,500 lines, used as a proxy for complexity.
My 30,000 LOC app has about 100,000 lines of plan behind it. Can't build something that big as a one-shot.
- Bishonen88 8mo agoDunno. My 80k+ LOC personal life planner, with a native android app, eink display view still one shots most features/bugs I encounter. I just open a new instance let it know what I want and 5min later it's done.
- therealdrag0 8mo agoIn 5 min you are one shotting smaller changes to the larger code base right? Not the entire 80k likes which was the other comments point afaict.
- Bishonen88 8mo agoYeah, then I guess I misunderstood the post. Its smaller features one by one ofc.
- makeramen 8mo agoBoth can be true. I have personally experienced both. Some problems AI surprised me immensely with fast, elegant efficient solutions and problem solving. I've also experienced AI doing totally absurd things that ended up taking multiple times longer than if I did it manually. Sometimes in the same project.
- vasco 8mo agoWhat is a personal life planner?
- Bishonen88 8mo agoTodos, habits, goals, calendar, meals, notes, bookmarks, shopping lists, finances. More or less that with Google cal integration, garmin Integration (Auto updates workout habits, weight goals) family sharing/gamification, daily/weekly reviews, ai summaries and more. All built by just prompting Claude for feature after feature, with me writing 0 lines.
- puchatek 8mo agoIs it on GH?
- Bishonen88 8mo agoIt was when I mvp'd it 3 weeks ago. Then I removed it as I was toying with the idea of somehow monetizing it. Then I added a few features which would make monetization impossible (e.g. How the app obtains etf/stock prices live and some other things). I reckon I could remove those and put in gh during the week if I don't forget. The quality of the Web app is SaaS grade IMO. Keyboard shortcuts, cmd+k, natural language parsing, great ui that doesn't look like made by ai in 5min. Might post here the link.
- mstkllah 8mo agoWould love to check it out too once you put it up.
- Bishonen88 8mo agoHere's a sneek peak into how it looks like/what it is. If there's still appetite for the source code, I'll probably drop a gh link by the end of the week: https://streamable.com/amdz92 https://streamable.com/amdz92
- PacificSpecific 8mo agoIf you wouldn't mind sharing more about this in the future I'd love to read about it. I've been thinking about doing something like that myself because I'm one of those people who have tried countless apps but there's always a couple deal breakers that cause me to drop the app. I figured trying to agentically develop a planner app with the exact feature set I need would be an interesting and fun experiment.
- Bishonen88 8mo agosame as you, I tried all sorts of apps. Todoist, habitica, fantastical, wunderlist, karakeep and more and more for all sorts of things. All are OK for most users, but none was GREAT for me. That's why I thought to give LLM's a proper spin. Get all the features I want, in the way I want. And anything I can come up with/see on the web over time, I can add myself within minutes instead of waiting for months for some 3rd party to perhaps add it. + No subscription fee. You can see my app in action here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119434 While I can share the code and it might make a good foundation for forks, creating one from scratch with claude's $100 subscription will take ~2-3 weeks to get it into the state you see in the video. And that is me prompting the LLM for ~30-60 minutes most days of those 2-3 weeks.
- PacificSpecific 8mo agoThat's awesome and a real motivator for me to try it myself. Especially since my employer is giving me a ton of credits for exploration I haven't been maximising to the point of hitting a usage limit. Very cool and thanks for sharing.
- onion2k 8mo agoif you don't plan perfectly, you'll have to start over from scratch if anything goes wrong This is my experience too, but it's pushed me to make much smaller plans and to commit things to a feature branch far more atomically so I can revert a step to the previous commit, or bin the entire feature by going back to main. I do this far more now than I ever did when I was writing the code by hand. This is how developers should work regardless of how the code is being developed. I think this is a small but very real way AI has actually made me a better developer (unless I stop doing it when I don't use AI... not tried that yet.)
- mattmanser 8mo agoDevelopers should work by wasting lots of time making the wrong thing? I bet if they did a work and motion study on this approach they'd find the classic: "Thinks they're more productive, AI has actually made them less productive" But lots of lovely dopamine from this false progress that gets thrown away!
- SpaceNoodled 8mo agoClassic 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...
- onion2k 8mo agoDevelopers should work by wasting lots of time making the wrong thing? Yes. In fact, that's not emphatic enough: HELL YES! More specifically, developers should experiment. They should test their hypothesis. They should try out ideas by designing a solution and creating a proof of concept, then throw that away and build a proper version based on what they learned. If your approach to building something is to implement the first idea you have and move on then you are going to waste so much more time later refactoring things to fix architecture that paints you into corners, reimplementing things that didn't work for future use cases, fixing edge cases than you hadn't considered, and just paying off a mountain of tech debt. I'd actually go so far as to say that if you aren't experimenting and throwing away solutions that don't quite work then you're only amassing tech debt and you're not really building anything that will last. If it does it's through luck rather than skill. Also, this has nothing to do with AI. Developers should be working this way even if they handcraft their artisanal code carefully in vi.
- dakolli 8mo agowtf, why would you write 100k lines of plan to produce 30k loc.. JUST WRITE THE CODE!!!
- Bishonen88 8mo agoThey didn't write 100k plan lines. The llm did (99.9% of it at least or more). Writing 30k by hand would take weeks if not months. Llms do it in an afternoon.
- AstroBen 8mo agoJust reading that plan would take weeks or months
- chickensong 8mo agoYou don't start with 100k lines, you work in batches that are digestible. You read it once, then move on. The lines add up pretty quickly considering how fast Claude works. If you think about the difference in how many characters it takes to describe what code is doing in English, it's pretty reasonable.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- dakolli 8mo agoAnd my weeks or months of work beats an LLMs 10/10 times. There are no shortcuts in life.
- tock 8mo agoMight be true for you. But there are plenty of top tier engineers who love LLMs. So it works for some. Not for others. And of course there are shortcuts in life. Any form of progress whether its cars, medicine, computers or the internet are all shortcuts in life. It makes life easier for a lot of people.
- 8mo ago
- AstroBen 8mo ago100,000 lines is approx. one million words. The average person reads at 250wpm. The entire thing would take 66 hours just to read, assuming you were approaching it like a fiction book, not thinking anything over
- chickensong 8mo ago> design -> plan -> execute in batches This is the way for me as well. Have a high-level master design and plan, but break it apart into phases that are manageable. One-shotting anything beyond a todo list and expecting decent quality is still a pipe dream.
- zozbot234 8mo ago> if you don't plan perfectly, you'll have to start over from scratch if anything goes wrong. You just revert what the AI agent changed and revise/iterate on the previous step - no need to start over. This can of course involve restricting the work to a smaller change so that the agent isn't overwhelmed by complexity.
- elAhmo 8mo agoHow can you know that 100k lines plan is not just slop? Just because plan is elaborate doesn’t mean it makes sense.
- dbbk 8mo agoThis is actually embarrassing. His "radically different" workflow is... using the built-in Plan mode that they recommend you use? What?
- sidpatil 8mo agoIt's not, to be fair. > I use my own `.md` plan files rather than Claude Code’s built-in plan mode. The built-in plan mode sucks.
- mvkel 8mo agoFrom Claude docs: Planning is most useful when you’re uncertain about the approach, when the change modifies multiple files, or when you’re unfamiliar with the code being modified. If this isn't true, skip the plan.
- oblio 8mo agoCan you easily version their plans using git?
- SignalStackDev 8mo ago[dead]