Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nojs 335 days ago
> Yes, it's not faster to develop with AI if you watch it work.

It’s actually a lot faster. You read the diffs as soon as they start coming in, and immediately course correct or re-prompt when you see bad mistakes.

3 comments

I don't have this experience. Watching and course correcting like this makes me realize I could have done a better job myself
That’s always true in my experience, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to. The trick I’m working towards is refining the workflow such that i can reliably produce maybe 90% as “good” as what I’d personally produce but much, much faster. All sorts of side work I was avoiding before also becomes much easier, less tedious refactors and large test coverage and etc. It can type much faster than I can, the trick is if we can constrain the thinking enough to make it useful. Keeping it as an autocomplete is as productive as it is difficult imo.
Indeed, I hit the stop button quite a bit when Claude goes off course. Then make a note of the right choice so maybe it won't do that again, revert and proceed. I have the feeling there is an optimal size of project proportional to the context size, where you can fit the critical design points into the context and/or there are enough examples in the code of how things should be done.
presumably you've done the work enough pre-AI to notice those mistakes?