Comment by calrain

2 days ago

There are definitely swings. Last night it took about 2 hours to get Monaco into my webpack built bootstrap template, it came down to CSS being mishandled and Claude couldn't see the light. I just pasted the code into ChatGPT o3 and it fixed it first try. I pasted the output of ChatGPT into Claude and viola, all done.

A key skill is to sense when the AI is starting to guess for solutions (no different to human devs) and then either lean into another AI or reset context and start over.

I'm finding the code quality increase greatly with the addition of the text 'and please follow best practices because will be pen tested on this!' and wow.. it takes it much more seriously.

Doesn't sound like you were writing actual functionality code, just integrating libraries?

  • That's right for this part of the work.

    Most of the coding needed to give people CRUD interfaces to resources is all about copy / pasting and integrating tools together.

    Sort of like the old days when we were patching all those copy/paste's from StackOverflow.

    Too little of full stack application writing is truly unique.

Is there a way to have two agentic AIs do pair programming?

  • I did experiment with this where Claude Code was the 'programmer' and ChatGPT was the Software Architect. The outcome was really solid and I made it clear that each was talking to an AI and they really seemed to collaborate and respect the key points of each side.

    It would be interesting to set up a MCP style interface, but even me copy/pasting between windows was constructive.

    The time this worked best was when I was building a security model for an API that had to be flexible and follow best practices. It was interesting seeing ChatGPT compare and contrast against major API vendors, and Claude Code asking the detailed implementation questions.

    The final output was a pragmatic middle-ground between simplistic and way too complex.