Comment by theflyinghorse

2 days ago

Workflow is this: - I have emacs open for code editing/reviews/git. - Separate terminal emulator with 1-3 claudes - I work on a story by splitting it into small steps ("Let's move this email logic to the email.service.ts", "here's the fields I'd need to add to the request, create a schema validation in a separate file, and update the router and controller") - I mostly watch claude, and occasionally walk through the code in emacs whenever I feel like I want to review code. - I handle external tools like git or db migrations myself not letting LLMs near them.

In essence, this is pretty much how you'd run a group of juniors - you'd sit on slack and jira diving up work and doing code reviews.

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theflyinghorse

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superfrank  2 days ago

> I work on a story by splitting it into small steps

It's funny because that's basically the approach I take in GH Copilot. I first work with it to create a plan broken up into small steps and save that to an md file and then I have it go one step at a time reviewing the changes as it goes or just when it's done.

I understand that you're using emacs to keep an eye on the code as it goes, so maybe what I wasn't groking was that people were using terminal based code editors to see the changes it was making. I assumed most people were just letting it do it s thing and then trying to review everything at the end, but felt like an anti-pattern given how much we (dev community) push for small PRs over gigantic 5k line PRs.

bluGill  1 day ago

At that point though isn't it just as fast/easy to cut/paste the code yourself? That was my conclusion after spending a week breaking things down - I was able to get good code out of the AI, but only after spending as much time writing the prompt as if I just did it myself. (note that this was my first attempt at using an agent, maybe I'll learn to do it better)

  • Daishiman  16 hours ago

    With some experience you start getting the hand of how big a task you can hand off, and then you give the agent a way to test the changes, like using a browser and checking for a component, or adding unit tests for the backend.

    Having a tight feedback loop for agents is critical for getting good output.