I think the journey means different things to different people. Not everyone is interesting in building their own power generation plant, mining silica and forging their own chips, writing a programming language from binary. I’d love to do that stuff if I didn’t have bills to pay, but sure am quite glad to skip through the knarley JavaScript implementation details and focus on the parts I know well (backend, data modeling, translating domain specific knowledge into product) and get something to market.
Ask your manager how they get humans to do those things, and copy that process.
So, get a bug tracker, track those bugs, tell Claude to pick tasks off it etc.
I'm not claiming this actually works, I've not tried it, I don't know how good it is for large brownfield projects, but that's the general sentiment I see.
I've tried it. It can work. My prompt was "Use the gh commandline tool to get the issues for the current repository, and work on them in order, with bugs taking priority."
Elsewhere there are steps for how to develop: 1. Create new branch for the feature you are working on; 2. implement the feature fully, thinking hard when you need to (toolcall think(low, med, high) switches the reasoning level);
Just vibe it, let AI take the lead; follow the flow, enjoy the ride and check the result. Be the manager the bot needs; those annoying details don't have to be your concern any more.
> Did we just stop caring about the art of programming altogether?
Yes. Decades ago for some.
I'm sure there have been a number of significant bugs caused by someone taking work from an outsourced team into production without sufficient review. Or even work from a local junior. Heck, even a local senior!¹
Outsourcing work to GlorifiedPredictiveText and friends should be treated the same was as passing it on to other humans, but at the moment it too often isn't as many have fallen for the marketing. Always remember: the models were trained on public code, and public code is far from always right. And the models hallucinate³ on top of that.
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[1] Around this time last year, I was that senior… Fun times. Luckily no permanent damage done², but that'll teach people not to trust me too much!
[2] It wasn't as smooth as I would have hoped, but the roll-back plan worked.
[3] Going back to the analogy of outsourcing to other humans: this is akin to “making shit up as they go along and hoping for the best”, which also very much happens and has happened for decades.