Comment by justbees

I'm getting really great results in a VERY old (very large) codebase by having discussion with the LLM (I'm using Claude code) and making detailed roadmaps for new features or converting old features to new more useable/modern code. This means FE and BE changes usually at the same time.

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.