I wish people would describe in more detail the tasks they use LLMs to code. My experience is that simple components in an existing architecture are fine, but anything requiring architectural considerations quickly becomes a mess. On my projects (e.g. a ui framework), running multiple agents in parallel would just increase the speed at which it can stuff up the project.
I get this question a lot, and I found it hard to answer briefly, so I ended up writing a longer post about how I work:
The short version is that I don’t let AI agents work unsupervised on my code. I treat them like participants in a mob programming session instead of autonomous developers. Different agents get different roles (implementer, reviewer, architect, security reviewer, etc.), and I stay involved throughout the process.
I also agree with your point about architecture. Generating isolated components is relatively easy; preserving and evolving the architectural boundaries across a larger codebase is much harder.
We’re still missing a good way to express and measure architectural quality. Until then, architecture heavy work requires much closer supervision than implementation heavy work
It's taken _a lot_ of time and effort, but this is an example of what can be developed using LLMs alone.
You have to have dedication and a goal to reach, but you can absolutely build anything if you're building with the right foundations in mind.
I think the relevant question isn’t what can be built but the amount of effort in comparison to doing this the old fashioned way.
What do you think the productivity gain was from using an LLM? This question assumes you’re already an experienced developer.
It's great for people who are just maintaining something. Less so for someone building something from scratch, in the earlier phases.
There are hour long youtube videos where people explain the process by using a complex toy project. Search for them.
Interestingly, despite it being much more detailed and a lot more process and procedure than what I currently do - which is more akin to the version 0 described, but in parallel - we come up at the same final problem: reviews and quality assurance.
I sign off the code I merged, part of company policy but also just to be sure it is actually decent. But reviewing has become the real draining bottleneck: even stacked PRs, if that total 5-6k lines is not a 5min job. Even if I brainstormed and set the plan, that's really the part that doesn't scale right now for me in this. But the author is very shy about that: either the changes arent that big in the end or they trust the process enough to review in a more casual manner. Being equally untrusting I can't do that ...
Proper review should take longer than writing it yourself, because you need to know the correct solution, understand the proposed solution, and evaluate the difference between the two. When designing it yourself, you just need to know the correct solution and write it, and with modern high-level languages and IDEs with autocomplete writing it is hardly a bottleneck.
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I don't know if I’m overly critical but there’s gotta be a middle ground between totally AI pilled people that otherwise have no talents, and control freak veteran developers who cant let go
My current process is also using Github projects in a normal scrum style way, with many tickets written or fleshed out and state managed by the LLM, and it doubling as the memory system
Completely leapfrogging all these other open and closed source concoctions and being more effective
But its effective enough that I don’t need OP’s final form state of still approving everything
Auto-mode is fine. Worktrees are built into Claude Code now. I just tell it to classify tickets as sequential or parallel possible and spawn subagents to tackle all of the tickets in the todo list
They all get their own context window its pretty perfect now
in the meantime I work in a couple tabs of Claude Design for different flows of any client side app. My philosophy has been that devs could pick up graphic and UI/UX design easily, its just still a full time job to make variations of layouts and portray their states.
UI/UX is not a full time job anymore.
And I use Claude chat to flesh out aspects of the overall idea
I think you may be overcomplicating your workflow in the concluding state.
Overall I agree that planning and intention is now most of the time, before a 10 subagent precision strike is initiated
There are tons of people, those are just not as vocal.
I wish people would describe in more detail the tasks they use LLMs to code. My experience is that simple components in an existing architecture are fine, but anything requiring architectural considerations quickly becomes a mess. On my projects (e.g. a ui framework), running multiple agents in parallel would just increase the speed at which it can stuff up the project.
I get this question a lot, and I found it hard to answer briefly, so I ended up writing a longer post about how I work:
https://www.trigosec.com/insights/mob-programming-for-one/
The short version is that I don’t let AI agents work unsupervised on my code. I treat them like participants in a mob programming session instead of autonomous developers. Different agents get different roles (implementer, reviewer, architect, security reviewer, etc.), and I stay involved throughout the process.
I also agree with your point about architecture. Generating isolated components is relatively easy; preserving and evolving the architectural boundaries across a larger codebase is much harder.
We’re still missing a good way to express and measure architectural quality. Until then, architecture heavy work requires much closer supervision than implementation heavy work
I built this with 94% written by coding agents: https://buildermark.dev/
The complete log of all prompts and commits is here: https://demo.buildermark.dev/projects/u020uhEFtuWwPei6z6nbN
It seems that pages 2-5 on
https://demo.buildermark.dev/projects/u020uhEFtuWwPei6z6nbN/...
still show content of page 1
Thanks for the report. I messed up the CDN settings. It looks fixed now.
I used LLMs to develop Whistle Enterprise (https://whistle-enterprise.com) from the ground up, from scratch.
It's taken _a lot_ of time and effort, but this is an example of what can be developed using LLMs alone.
You have to have dedication and a goal to reach, but you can absolutely build anything if you're building with the right foundations in mind.
I think the relevant question isn’t what can be built but the amount of effort in comparison to doing this the old fashioned way.
What do you think the productivity gain was from using an LLM? This question assumes you’re already an experienced developer.
It's great for people who are just maintaining something. Less so for someone building something from scratch, in the earlier phases.
There are hour long youtube videos where people explain the process by using a complex toy project. Search for them.
Interestingly, despite it being much more detailed and a lot more process and procedure than what I currently do - which is more akin to the version 0 described, but in parallel - we come up at the same final problem: reviews and quality assurance.
I sign off the code I merged, part of company policy but also just to be sure it is actually decent. But reviewing has become the real draining bottleneck: even stacked PRs, if that total 5-6k lines is not a 5min job. Even if I brainstormed and set the plan, that's really the part that doesn't scale right now for me in this. But the author is very shy about that: either the changes arent that big in the end or they trust the process enough to review in a more casual manner. Being equally untrusting I can't do that ...
Proper review should take longer than writing it yourself, because you need to know the correct solution, understand the proposed solution, and evaluate the difference between the two. When designing it yourself, you just need to know the correct solution and write it, and with modern high-level languages and IDEs with autocomplete writing it is hardly a bottleneck.
I don't know if I’m overly critical but there’s gotta be a middle ground between totally AI pilled people that otherwise have no talents, and control freak veteran developers who cant let go
My current process is also using Github projects in a normal scrum style way, with many tickets written or fleshed out and state managed by the LLM, and it doubling as the memory system
Completely leapfrogging all these other open and closed source concoctions and being more effective
But its effective enough that I don’t need OP’s final form state of still approving everything
Auto-mode is fine. Worktrees are built into Claude Code now. I just tell it to classify tickets as sequential or parallel possible and spawn subagents to tackle all of the tickets in the todo list
They all get their own context window its pretty perfect now
in the meantime I work in a couple tabs of Claude Design for different flows of any client side app. My philosophy has been that devs could pick up graphic and UI/UX design easily, its just still a full time job to make variations of layouts and portray their states.
UI/UX is not a full time job anymore.
And I use Claude chat to flesh out aspects of the overall idea
I think you may be overcomplicating your workflow in the concluding state.
Overall I agree that planning and intention is now most of the time, before a 10 subagent precision strike is initiated
There are tons of people, those are just not as vocal.
More Yegge tier psychosis.
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