Comment by stillpointlab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stillpointlab | Hacker News Reader

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It does, but I have to direct it and review it. That means I have to think about it, research it, consider how the new feature or system fits in with the existing feature or system. I have to make decisions on libraries/dependencies. I have to consider how the project will evolve in the next week, month, quarter. I communicate all of that to Claude in an interactive planning session and it outputs a detailed spec, ready for implementation.

All of that thinking, planning, rewriting, etc. takes almost as long as it takes Claude to actually deliver the feature. The big features Claude writes take ~30-45min of uninterrupted coding to deliver (I just checked the last feature was 39m 41s for +1,610/-26). To write that same code would have taken me probably 2 days.

How do you expect it to give you what you want if you don't think about it?

Solution spaces for even seemingly simple problems is incredibly large. There's a reason there's a thousand different types of nails and a million types of screw heads. Just making every screw head Phillips (or pick another) doesn't just make things work.

But you need expertise to know these things. They're the issues that are subtle and appear to work but you end up breaking things (often invisibly) and just end up chasing problem after problem. It looks like a new problem but it's rooted in something else.

I agree, but that is the crux of my initial post. There is a ceiling to how quick I can deliver using LLM coding agents which is the speed at which I can write good enough specs.

I feel I'm at the point now where the time the LLM takes to deliver a feature, no matter how big, is nearly inconsequential. Because while it is in the process of delivering the feature, I am writing the next spec, and by the time I finish the spec the agent is waiting for the next feature. And at that point I have to review it's code, give it feedback, review it's fixes, merge, etc. All of the "waiting" is on me. It is basically delivering features as fast as I can write specs and could only get faster if I write specs faster.

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