alt Hacker NewsWhy are you letting the LLM drive? Don't turn on auto-approve, approve every command the agent runs. Don't let it make design or architecture decisions, you choose how it is built and you TELL that clanker what's what! No joke, if you treat the AI like a tool then you'll get more mileage out of it. You won't get 10x gains, but you will still understand the code.
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That's the trap though. The moment you approve every step, you're no longer getting the product that was sold to you. You're doing code review on a stochastic intern. The whole 10x story depends on you eventually looking away.
Because the degree to which the LLM prompts you back to the terminal is too frequent for the human to engage in parallel work.
I define tools that perform individual tasks, like build the application, run the tests, access project management tools with task context, web search, edit files in the workspace, read only vs write access source control, etc.
The agent only has access to exactly what it needs, be it an implementation agent, analysis agent, or review agent.
Makes it very easy to stay in command without having to sit and approve tons of random things the agent wants to do.
I do not allow bash or any kind of shell. I don't want to have to figure out what some random python script it's made up is supposed to do all the time.
Because its SO much faster not to have to do all that. I think 10x is no joke, and if you're doing MVP, its just not worth the mental effort.
I agree with this too. I decided on constraints for myself around these tools and I give my complete focus & attention to every prompt, often stopping for minutes to figure things through and make decisions myself. Reviewing every line they produce. I'm a senior dev with a lot of experience with pair programming and code review, and I treat its output just as I would those tasks.
It has about doubled my development pace. An absolutely incredible gain in a vacuum, though tiny compared to what people seem to manage without these self-constraints. But in exchange, my understanding of the code is as comprehensive as if I had paired on it, or merged a direct report's branch into a project I was responsible for. A reasonable enough tradeoff, for me.
This is significantly slower than just writing the code yourself.
I have never found any utility in that. After all, you can still just review the diffs and ask it for explanation for sections instead.
Personally I've found "carefully review every move it makes" to be an extremely unpleasant and difficult workflow. The effort needed to parse every action is immense, but there's a complete absence of creative engagement - no chance of flow state. Just the worst kind of work which I've been unable to sustain, unfortunately. At this point I mostly still do work by hand.