My workflow, at a high level, is:

1. I write a high level spec. Not as high level as a single-sentence prompt, but high level enough to capture my top requirements.

2. I prompt the AI to interview me about the spec to clear up any ambiguity or open questions, then when I’m satisfied, the AI writes a longer spec, which I then review.

3. Then I prompt the AI to write an implementation plan based on the spec. I might just skim this, and by this point I might be asking the LLM more questions than it’s asking me.

4. Now I hand it off to the implementer agent.

This isn’t cowboy coding, it’s not even agile. It’s waterfall. The problem with doing waterfall was that it’s too slow, especially with the deserialization/serialization cost of routing all of this documentation through meatbrains. The LLM is doing just as much work, true, but faster.

The thing I found surprising was that, while LLM’s are still pretty awful at writing as an art form, they are better technical writers than I have the time to be, especially when writing for an audience of other LLM’s.

We’re still going to have handwritten software, just like we still have handwritten assembly. It just won’t be the norm.

One of the lesser discussed Brooks essays is actually the best description of AI-first development: the “surgical team”. It just turns out the surgeon is the only human, and like many modern surgeries, the surgeon is controlling a robot instead of operating by hand.

It would be interesting to reread The Mythical Man-Month and see how each essay applies to AI-first development.

Maybe with issues like abortion or racial discrimination, but not tariffs.

That's why most PERM job postings are advertised in the classified ads of the print edition of a newspaper, instead of anywhere that anybody actually looks for jobs in the 21st century. If nobody applies, nobody needs to be rejected.

Some of the main proponents of the "Japanese occupation" narrative are the KMT, who committed plenty of atrocities of their own after taking over Taiwan and, among many Taiwanese, ended up more hated than the Japanese. The KMT was also serious about their lost cause of retaking the mainland, at which point they expected Taiwan and China to remain unified under their rule, with the famous "One China Principle" representing not just the CCP's desire to control Taiwan, but the principle shared by the KMT that Taiwan is part of China and should be under the same government. In recent years, the KMT has pivoted towards cooperation with the CCP with an aim towards peaceful reunification, while the DPP favors explicit Taiwanese independence (Taiwan's official constitutional stance still being that it is the legitimate Republic of China).

To be fair to the KMT, they also ushered in Taiwanese democracy. When Chiang Kai-shek died, his son and successor Chiang Ching-kuo ended martial law, promised to be the last Chiang to rule Taiwan, and began the transition to democracy. His successor, Lee Teng-hui, was Taiwanese-born and finished the transition to democracy, winning the first democratic Taiwanese presidential election in 1996 before stepping down at the end of his term limit in 2000, at which point power transitioned to the DPP. Lee was also controversial with the hardliners in his own party for, among other things, his more sympathetic attitude towards Japan.