I'm increasingly thinking either people were terrible developers, used shit tools to begin with, or are in a mass psychosis. I certainly feel bad for anyone reporting to "the business guy." He never respected you to begin with, and now he literally thinks "why are you so slow? I can build Airbnb in a weekend."

For someone who previously could achieve nothing, these tools are magical, as they can now achieve something. It feels to them like infinity because their base was 0. That alone will create a lot of things they wouldn't have been able to, good for them. However for people who already know what they're doing, I only feel slightly pushed along some asymptote. My bottlenecks simply are not measured in tokens to screen.

To make it viable, all value objects are code-generated from model schemas, and then customized as needed (only like 5% need customization beyond basic data types). I have auto-upcasting on setters so you can code stringly when wanted, but everything is validated (very useful for writing unit tests more quickly). I only parse into types at boundaries or on writes/sets, not on reads/gets (limit's the amount of boxing, particularly on reading large amounts of data). Heavy use of reflection, and auto-wiring/dependency injection.

But with these conventions in place, I quite enjoy it. Easy to customize/narrow a type. One convention for all validation. External inputs are by default secure with nice error messages. Once place where all values validation happens (./values classes folder).

The argument seems to be, we should float on a thin lubricant of "that's someone else's concern" (either the AI or the PMs) gliding blissfully from one ticket to another. Neither grasping our goal nor our outcome. If the tests are green and the buttons submit, mission accomplished!

Using Claude I can feel my situational awareness slipping from my grasp. It's increasingly clear that this style of development pushes you to stop looking at any of the code at all. My English instructions do not leave any residual growth. I learn nothing to send back up the chain, and I know nothing of what's below. Why should I exist?

I'm also working on a new strength gains-tracking app that is a lot more intuitive, motivating and friend first. I've been using it with some friends for the last 10 weeks and everyone making is consistent gains. It is my first full PWA, vanillaJs, backend is Lucee & MySQL. Works great on iOS and Android, no one has any complaints. The web stack has come a long way I am probably not going to do a native mobile app for a while. I'll probably make it public in a couple weeks.

Knowing how to acquire, support and cultivate a growing user base is the challenge.

The availability of a technical "moat" has always been a select property of only a few products. All real moats are network effects.

So in essence, the process is what I might call 'eventually modelled' (to borrow from the concept of eventual consistency). I use the LLM entities as is, and gradually conform them to my desired ontology as I discover the correct ontology over time.