ai_assisted_dev

Nitpicking...

Nice way of gatekeeping "flow state of programmers", considering I have been a software engineer for the past 2 decades. So I have experienced quite some flow states in my life, and this is no different.

It takes quite the practice. At least I have been shipping stuff to users like this for the entire year.

It definitely changed how I get into flow state for me. But music still works, if not even better when coding with AI (listening to: techno, electro, edm). Generally my flow is to sit down, make a small plan of what I will work on, fire off 2 agents to work on different parts of the code that are lower hanging fruits (takes 2-10 mins for them to complete). Then while this is busy, map out some bigger tasks.

Agents finish, I queue them up with new low hanging fruits, while I architect the much bigger tasks, then fire that off -> Review smaller tasks. It really is a dance, but flow is much easier achieved when I do get into it; hours really just melt together. The important thing to do is to put my phone away, and block all and any social media or sites I frequent, because its easy to get distracted when agents aren just producing code and you're sitting on the sidelines.

Also to add another point is that if you felt like an agent did not help you correctly, or way overshot, did too much edits, etc. Go back to the original prompt, rephrase it - sometimes you need 1-2 times. Sometimes the model just don't work for your workflow. It can become quite delicate.

One of the bigger things is when you introduced some bug, start working backwards with the agent, simplifying whatever you build to its bare necessities, and the moment it dissapears, start a new chat, and build it back up to what it was before (in the desired non-bugged state). This often works if you then also switch to a completely different model.

I usually do write the whole article. Maybe I spend an hour on it. Sometimes even much longer. And then I have a way of rewriting it with AI to improve the writing style. Which I then proof read and keep improving. I do this because reading back what I wrote feels even worse than listening to my own voice. It just gives me a visceral reaction lol. But yes this worked. I always wanted to write and blog prior to AI, but my aversion to proofreading my own writing stopped me from doing so over a decade (dozen actual genuine attempts).

Google does not mind. I rank quite highly for some niche keyword on LLM programming.

The biggest tip I can give you is to stay in the framework you are most convenient in, and have the most experience. Start building stuff the way you would by yourself, but then start delegating the repetitive tasks to an agent. My best recommendations would be using Cursor in Agent mode, and switching to VScode in Agent mode when your credits with Cursor run out. The reason why I like Cursor more is because of the Checkpoints. And VScode Copilot Agent checkpoints suck; but you can still use git to create your own checkpoints (git add / git stash, etc).

I don't even use completions, really just agent mode. I do planning, wireframing, creating specs all with agents. Even small MVPs created in 5 minutes, deployed in 10, during a meeting to just brainstorm. As for the models. Go with Claude 3.5 or 4.0, GPT5. Use sequentialthinking and Taskmaster MCP. I could write a book about it... but the best way to go about it is to dive into, get frustrated, push through and then learn it the hard way. I started delegating a lot of my programming work the day ChatGPT came out; just copy and pasting, and since that day, my reliance on AI has just been increasing, and I have been getting better at it (and now I am at this stage.. with 2 PMS).

I land most of my clients by maintaining my blog and a github with open source projects. I have build a lot of general purpose MCPs and quite some tools, which are all written by Claude (3.5 and 4.0) and now GPT5. On my blog I just blog together with AI. It sounds silly, yes... I don't want to share it here publicly, but it looks good and it gets me people in my inbox (email/linkedin).

So I post on LinkedIn & Reddit, and I am not doing it in a spammy way. Do some outreach through LinkedIn and post on YCombinator on my personal account on the monthly who's hiring/freelancing posts. But a lot of the traffic I get comes from organic search and reddit -> clients. I had a client who told me they found me on Twitter; but I never even posted there, so someone reposted an article.

I have been in software for 20 years, and was just about to quit 2-3 years ago because of how mundane things became. And now I am actually loving it again because of AI. I'd say, AI writes 95% of my code, and I use it for 75% of the decisions during working on a project.

I am under MUCH more pressure to deliver more in shorter periods of time, with just me involved in several layers of decision making, rather than having a whole team. Which may sound scary, but it pays the bills. At one company I contract with, I now have 2 PMs; where I am the only dev on a production app with users, shipping new features every few days (rather than weeks).

It feels more like performance art, than it even feels like software development at this point. I am still waiting for some of my features to come crashing prod down in fantastic fashion, being paged at 3am in the morning; debugging for 12 hours straight because AI has built such a gigantic footgun for me.... but it has yet to happen. If anything I am doing less work than before - being paid a little more, and the companies working with me have built a true dependency on my skills to both ship, maintain and implement stuff.

I find it absolutely awesome:

1. I love AI/ML hearing about stuff, and seeing it boom this much is great.

2. I really do enjoy working with LLMs and seeing what they can do.

3. It is quite amazing what non-technical people can now do with AI Assisted coding.

4. Working with LLMs within IDEs is getting quite good too.

I understand that there are still people who are not buying it, but quite honestly, its becoming harder to side with them. I have been in Software for 2 decades, and this "craze" has given me the most amount of enjoyment I have gotten since I figured out how to build a website sometime in my teens!

People underestimate how widespread this actually is.

Perfectly fair. It's not like YouTube is some free open source platform. Infra needs to be paid, creators need to be paid, they have a whole eco-system. Why not just pay for premium if you use it that much?

Do you mean Claude Code? Or something else? As for usage, do you mean the product I am working on? Happy to answer.

I still don't understand how cursor is making any money at all. I spend so much time inside cursor, that I am spending 10-20$ per day on additional requests. Now if I connect model provider APIs to windsurf, I'd be spending upwards of 100$ due to amount of tokens I use through the API per day. And if I connect my own API key to Cursor, I immediately get rate limited for any request, because I go well above 50 per minute. And I did try claude code, but its just not on par with my experience with Cursor.

I could probably go much lower, and find a model that is dirt cheap but takes a while; but right now the cutting edge (for my own work) is Claude 4 (non-max / non-thinking). To me it feels like Cursor must be hemorrhaging money. The thing that works for me is that I am able to justify those costs working on my own services, that has some customers, and each added feature gives me almost immediate return on investment. But to me it feels like the current rates that cursor charges are not rooted in reality.

Quickly checking Cursor for the past 4 day period:

Requests: 1049

Lines of Agent Edits: 301k

Tabs accepted: 84

Personally, I have very little complaints or issues with cursor. Only a growing wish list of more features and functionality. Like how cool would it be if asynchronous requests would work? Rather than just waiting for a single request to complete on 10 files, why can't it work on those 10 files in parralel at the same time? Because now so much time is spend waiting for the request to complete (while I work on another part of the app in a different workspace with Cursor).