Comment by pmontra

2 days ago

I'm about to complete a new non trivial functionality in a project of a costumer of mine. I spent an hour writing the spec. Then I asked Claude (Sonnet 4.6) to check if I missed something. I did, the sort of minor issues one notice after starting writing code, edge cases etc. That made me think about more issues and after a few iterations we settled down on a spec. I asked Claude to make an implementation plan and we ended up with 9 steps. It wrote the code for a step with new automatic tests and I performed some manual QA, which found further issues we didn't think about. We are at step 8 of 9 in about 12 hours of work. I would have needed a week to be there alone, with time spent researching and fixing bugs I created along the way, an inevitable part of our job but not exactly the most pleasant one.

This speedup is great. It improves the overall quality of the product (as perceived by the users) because I can ask Claude to add features that my customers and I would have dismissed because they take too long to implement. We would have settled down with a more basic UX.

So is it a game changer? It is in the same way those HTML / CSS framework like Bootstrap were game changers: suddenly every developer could create a decent and consistent UI in a fraction of the time with a few bells and whistles that we wouldn't have bothered coding. As a side effect a lot of web apps felt look alike mass products and web designers had to reinvent themselves, but the economics leaded inevitably in that direction. Would I spend again one of two weeks doing alone what I could write in a day or two with a LLM? Not anymore, not at this cost ($20 per month.)

8 comments

pmontra

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jowsie  2 days ago

I'd love to read a full transcript of someone going through this kind of collaborative programming. I see this kind of process mentioned a lot but can't quite figure out the details in my head. If anyone has a link to a blog post or similar showing this process in depth, I'd love to give it a read :)

  • tkocmathla  1 day ago

    I've been using superpowers [1] for this purpose, and have really appreciated how it guides the model to use careful, methodical approaches to answering my prompts. It's great for multi-step planning, design, and implementation, but also has guidance for debugging, accepting a code review, etc.

    [1] https://github.com/obra/superpowers

    • burnto  1 day ago

      Yeah I feel like I’ve learned a lot from superpowers. It’s such a thoughtfully developed skillset.

  • sntran  2 days ago

    I think it will click once you actually sit down with the AI agent, toggle Plan mode, and just tell it what you want to do in couple of sentences. It will immediately start building up the plan, presenting it to you what it thinks is the right approach , with the steps to take, with open questions that you can look at and answers. Then send them back to the AI. Repeat. That process along would give you a progress way further than you try to do it by yourself.

    You can tell it to start implementing step 1. And you pick it up from there. Very natural how you would approach an expert for help, but you can always audit.

    • pmontra  1 day ago

      I did not use plan mode but I'll give it a try.

      I can't provide a transcript because it's work I made for a customer and I'm bound to a clause of confidentiality.

      What I did is what I use to do while starting to work on a major feature: make a list of changes, new and modified functionality, think which code and db tables I will touch and how, set constraints on the edits (eg: that API must not change, that one must be retro compatible) etc. I've been a bit pedantic because this time I had to tell it to someone else. I wrote it into a md file and asked Claude to check the code and find out if my plan was consistent with the code we were starting from. It made a list of things that I needed to detail more, added some questions and we iterated on it. Basically it's what I do myself but it happened faster.

PeterStuer  2 days ago

You describe almost exactly how I work, except I always use Opus with effort locked at max. Lots of detailed multi level planning, then coding the different planned steps, which it at that point just one shots, with a plan review and adaptation after each step.

5x speedup and quality.