alt Hacker NewsLoops work when you spend the proper amount of time to understand what you want ahead of time. The prerequisite is clarity — enough clarity that you could write a careful specification that you could hand off to a junior colleague.
Often, it takes 5-6 broken crappy versions of a thing until you understand that. There is no accelerating the 5-6 broken crappy versions - there’s no agent tech that’s going to help your meat brain avoid thinking time.
So most of my time is iterating between these two phases: I don’t understand what I want, I need to read and write and play with code, okay it’s been long enough I think I know what I want (it is extremely easy to deceive yourself) … okay now I do actually know what I want and I can write a loop.
Many people think they can jump ahead with agents. You cannot fake understanding or clarity. It is painfully obviously when someone skipped that meat brain understanding phase.
I had codex write a tool to extract all my pi sessions. (Had to filter out my prompts from the agents talking to subagents).
Then I had it analyze the patterns i was making and turned that into the flowchart for the outer guidance-creating-prompt.
I didn't have to spend too much time thinking what i wanted. I wanted it to do that.
The result is still mixed, and i'm not trusting it with delicate code bases, but for a game i've been building i dropped my check-in time to 1/5th i was previously spending on it.
Thats not a good thing per-se. I'm sure i'm missing good ideas by _not_ spending time with it. But previously I really had stagnated with my prompts becoming mechanical #now-do-this and #now-review-that with 90% of its suggestions being correct.
Just need to (automatically) remind it to "do the hard stuff first, clean up & refactor as you go" as well as a "reflect on your work" after its first return to get it to spill the beans on any crap left behind, and then process that in the guidance-creating-prompt to dish out new work.