alt Hacker NewsTalking the problem to death with the AI before implementation is a nice zone for me. I feel productive, get good results out of the AI, and still largely understand the code. That’s the part of the AI revolution that I feel has made me a better engineer because I argue about design and architecture all day with a robot.
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Despite the cynical sibling reply, I also feel like there's real value here. Contrary to the meme, I don't think Claude just tells me I'm brilliant, but really does push back on directions that are unproductive, helps identify when a part is overcomplicated or a dependency has become redundant, etc. Those are important things to have at least a sightline on before getting too deep into the code, even (or maybe especially) in a world where an awful lot of code can be created basically for free.
One strategy I use in the planning phase is even when I know how I'd implement the solution, I ask the Claude/Codex how they would solve the problem or implement the feature without giving them any clues - and then compare their solutions to my own. Often I am pleasantly surprised by alternative ways of doing things and ideas that we integrate into the final design.
How would you approach this problem if you are let's say token constrained due to per month limits set in your company?
What I've tried to do is make the bot write detailed spec documents, slowly building it over time as I explain the full problem.
It works for the most part but it's you have some non standard requirement, the agent seems to skip over that part of the spec document when it starts to code. Or it would have needless checks for situations that I said will never happen
I agree with this take. But this take also means that actual productive token use is not as high as people currently make it out to be.
AI is an excellent rubber duck and test writer. Maybe I sniff my farts too much but I like my code just the way I want it lol
>I argue about design and architecture all day with a robot.
You will outgrow it at some point.
I follow the same process. I have a design in mind for the problem at hand, but I don't reveal it to Codex. I go back and forth a bit to see if its proposals are better than mine. I go back and forth on tradeoffs of various approaches. And then I ask it to compare its proposals with mine. I "win" most of the time but there are many times where it shows a me a better, or simpler approach, or makes me rethink the solution altogether.
Once this is done, the mechanical coding parts are mostly routine (for codex)