Style can be as important as substance.

I still do a lot of back and forth about the plan - have it written to a file. Read through the file, make changes by hand and have claude read my changes and on and on. But starting with the basic architecture there's less ambiguity.

https://classictvhistory.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/turkeys-aw...

CLARKE BROWN: The turkey drop was actually a real incident. ... Although the turkeys were thrown off the back of a truck, as opposed to how it was depicted on the [show].

That was where their process was breaking down - When did we buy this? How much was it? The sort of things that are semi-difficult to keep track of when you're going to A LOT of estate sales and then basically need to enter all the stuff into a spreadsheet when you get home.

So the concept was - take pics and enter simple data as you're out and about and then export the data when you get home.

I ended up going way down some deep rabbit holes because I didn't want to host any data (my goal was to actual release the app and hosting people's shopping trips wasn't something I wanted to take on).

So it's all local storage and for sharing between family members I ended up embedding the data in a pdf that you can send in a text and then import - so if x people are at the same sale they can all add to the same "trip" at the same time and then combine the trip when they're all finished shopping.

So image and data optimization were big concerns since it's all on your phone until you export it/delete the trip.

I was a fun process until it wasn't :P

I did end up getting to 1.0 and shipping to the app store, which was really my goal -> make an app and go all the way through the process. So in that way it was a success.

His doctor asked him about using drugs and he made a joke that was something like "I only use coke" - meaning coca-cola. Of course his doctor knew he was kidding about drinking too much soda because he eats/drinks too much sugar. So they had a little laugh and moved on.

BUT now it's in his medical transcripts. My mom said it "transcribed" it as something like "the patient responded he has used cocaine recently".

I guess his doctor doesn't go in and actually fix things or even read over what the transcription says...

Also both of my parents have accents and have reported really weird transcriptions that don't match what they actually said.

So now my mom has told my dad he can't make jokes with the doctor anymore because even if the doctor knows he's joking it's going to get noted down as a "fact".

One off it seems fine, but a huge backbone app gets really complicated for me. Show me a huge react app vs a huge backbone app and I will understand the react much more quickly.

"It's verbose, sure, but there's no mystery. A junior developer can trace exactly what happens and when. The mental model is straightforward: "when this happens, do this."

I don't think that's true. A large backbone app has a lot of code that you'll have to trace through multiple files in different directories - the template are here, the functions are there but the endpoints are over there and... maybe it's just the backbone app I have to update but it's much more confusing and abstracted than the react app I also have to update. And don't even get me started with adding a new component. I can drop a new component into the react app and import it anywhere and it's super fast and easy... backbone not so much.

This is just a new tool. I think the farming example mentioned in another post is actually a great example. I love coding. I code in my free time. It's just fun. I've been doing it for ~20 years and I don't plan on stopping anytime soon!

But at work I'm really focused on results more than the fun I can have writing code. If a tractor makes the work easier/faster why would I not use a tractor? Breaking my back plowing isn't really my end goal at work. Having a plowed field is my end goal. If I can ride around in a tractor while doing it great! If I can monitor a fleet of tractors that are plowing multiple fields at once even better!

When I go home I can plant anything I want in any way I want and take all the time I want. Of course that's probably why in my free time I end up working on games I never finish...

I think a lot of the points you make are exactly what I'm trying to do.

- start with a detailed roadmap (created by the ai from a prompt and written to a file)

- discuss/adjust the roadmap and give more details where needed

- analyze existing features for coding style/patterns, reusable code, existing endpoints etc. (write this to a file as well)

- adjust that as needed for the new feature/converted feature - did it miss something? Is there some specific way this needs to be done it couldn't have known?

- step through the roadmap and give feedback at each step (I may need to step in and make changes - I may realize we missed a step, or that there's some funky thing we need to do specifically for this codebase that I forgot about - let the LLM know what the changes are and make sure it understands why those changes were made so it won't repeat bad patterns. i.e. write the change to the .md files to document the update)

- write tests to make sure everything was covered... etc etc

Basically all the things you would normally WANT do but often aren't given enough time to do. Or the things you would need to do to get a new dev up to speed on a project and then give feedback on their code.

I know I've been accomplishing a lot more than I could do on my own. It really is like managing another dev or maybe like pair programming? Walk through the problem, decide on a solution, iterate over that solution until you're happy with the decided path - but all of that can take ~20 minutes as opposed to hours of meetings. And the end result is factors of time less than if I was doing it on my own.

I recently did a task that was allotted 40 hours in less than 2 working days - so probably close to 10-12 hours after adjusting for meetings and other workday blah blah blah. And the 40 hour allotment wasn't padded. It was a big task, but doing the roadmap > detailed structure including directory structure - what should be in each file etc etc cut the time down dramatically.

I would NOT be able to do this if I the human didn't understand the code extremely well and didn't make a detailed plan. We'd just end up with more bad code or bad & non-working code.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30416387

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, by Deborah Blum.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/292812/ghost-hunter...