89 points•gpi•10 days ago•46 comments•

46 comments

hibikir10 days ago
Will has trouble with this in a relatively nimble org, where he has good control of what is adopted. Imagine how much fun this is in more ossified enterprise environments, where getting work done efficiently means bypassing process with dev lead and line management blessings. The differences in performance among individuals has never been wider, and not just gains in productivity, but performance losses as some people who have iffy judgement cause trouble a lot faster.

Maintaining quality when an organization just lacks the muscle to make changes and nobody has the mandate to try to make sure uptime is in good shape is a challenge. A lot of things break, precisely because there's just as much change as Will sees, but it's very unevenly distriuted.

alexpotato10 days ago
So I ended up doing something similar:

- Create a Git Hub project board for issues

- Connect Grok to the above

- Use Grok voice mode to take ideas, have Grok refine them with me and then save them as issues

- Created slash commands in OpenCode like /ni (new issue), /do (do an issue), /curr (what is the current issue), /done (self explanatory)

- I generally tell the OpenCode instance to /do <number> and then off it goes

This give me several benefits:

- I can use Grok Voice while walking or driving to develop and test ideas

- I can lose my entire local OpenCode setup but still have relevant data in the issues

- multiple machines can read from GitHub

- I could go even further and have separate user accounts for each of my bots.

Having been both a PM, dev, SRE and manager, this really does feel like managing a team of devs.

mentalgear10 days ago
and do you ever look at the code afterwards? The 'software factory' gets exponentially nastier the longer it is kept running without someone with actual experience 'shoving it' back in shape ever so often ... and even then.
le-mark10 days ago
Sounds like token burn maxing to me. Ie end up with a lot of “not quite” prototypes soooo try again?
K3UL10 days ago
Someone who thinks doing this while driving hardly resonates as someone who cares about safety or quality
madarco10 days ago
I've done the same but using Notion, and I've found really interesting to let the agents write a small "Dev Blog" post on a Notion page with what they built in the sessions, with screenshots, videos etc.

Also working with parallel sandboxes is a must: I use a manger session that read/write the issues from Notion and dispatch them to workers, it handles similar work to the same box to minimize merge conflicts.

PS: I'm using AgentBox for this (discl: I'm the author, free OSS): npm -g i @madarco/agentbox but now also Claude is releasing Projects (still rolling out) and Cursor had cloud agents for a while

botacode10 days ago
don't work while driving, you're putting other people at risk by being distracted
skeledrew10 days ago
It's not really that different from talking with a coworker about something, whether if they were on the phone or in the passenger seat.
jmathai10 days ago
That’s very close to my setup. Agree it’s a massive shift that doesn’t even resemble how I used to create products before.

https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-one...

andyjohnson010 days ago
> I can use Grok Voice while walking or driving to develop and test ideas

Musk would be so proud. Do you by any chance drive a cybertruck too?

Seriously, don't do this while you're driving. Or even while your car is driving. Its dangerous to be distracted in that situation.

richardbarosky10 days ago
Writing about these things in public and putting yourself out there is greatly appreciated. Hats off for that!

However, as far as what's being pursued, it seems more like wantonly trying to ride a hype cycle without strongly questioning the end-to-end value of new software development approaches or vetting their immediate suitability.

Personally, I think it would be more sensible to take a few individuals or a smaller team(s) and do more isolated/skunkworks experimentation and adopt as justified based on what those people report/experience. The smaller group can adjust faster and iterate/advise the larger dev org about the good approaches/techniques/strategies, and avoid more broad damage/chaos for things that aren't that well thought out.

For more conservative AI use cases like adding to code review, writing low stakes PR summaries, or beefing up security checking, a more global, but still not off-the-rails, approach would be the kinds of things that would make more sense to push more broadly.

bsilvereagle10 days ago
Has anyone demonstrably gained market share over a competitor who is vocally _not_ adopting agentic software development flows? This article outlines a lot of process churn without a clear through line to how it is impacting feature development or revenue.
joenot44310 days ago
A few months ago, someone who runs a front end shop posted an open letter proudly stating their intention to never adopt AI coding, and that their sites, which were excellent, would continue to be handcrafted. I think about them sometimes, wondering if they stuck to their word or not. If people are interested I can try to find the post.

I've built websites on the side for friends and SMBs for years now. Previously a lot of WP, but now it's just static sites I host on a VPS which are built with Claude. I think the sites are very good, but they're not winning awards. The newer static sites from Claude are miles better than the WP ones. The stack is usually irrelevant for my clients, they want their site to look good, load immediately, never go down, and show up on Google.

One of my more recent projects was for a buddy who runs a local gym. From start to finish it was probably 4h of work. The same site would have taken me probably 40h back in 2018. He was happy with the price and I was thrilled with the timeline, it was wins all around.

To bring it it back to your question, I think in the space of modest static sites for SMBs, any agency using AI will almost certainly outcompete ones that aren't.

I'm aware this little story is a simplification of the topic you're getting at, but I do think it's a sign of what's to come.

redmattred10 days ago
> vocally _not_ adopting agentic software development flows

I suspect that the vendors out there who have not adopted AI development and are losing market share to competitor who has are not vocal about not being an adopter, they are just complacent.

bicx10 days ago
My team is in the agentic orchestrator phase. I like this software factory pattern in concept, but our biggest challenges in development are acceptance testing of anything UI-related. Mobile app testing in particular is still a huge bottleneck that requires a human. AI models really suck at identifying poor usability and jank, particularly because they only typically process snapshots of the app from an instance in time.

I know there are traditional testing frameworks that can detect jitter and frame drop to a certain level. We could potentially start having agents build that in.

If we had concrete designs and specs on every project, that would also be helpful, but in a fast-moving startup, that gets delegated to the builders. That puts a human back in the loop every time.

Curious to hear what anyone else does to fully adopt a software factory pattern.

sroerick10 days ago
I totally agree with this. Agents seem tremendously bad at UI to me. Maybe it's just because I am a back end guy.

Right now I'm working on a declarative UI framework which can help me along here. My thought is that if I sacrifice a little control for sane primitives, that will make that spec /build loop easier.

I think ClayUI is a really interesting "reduced instruction set" for UI. I don't know that immediate mode UI is the right call for anything web related (that's how you get React lol) but his reduced primitive layer is very interesting to me

flir10 days ago
> Right now I'm working on a declarative UI framework which can help me along here

After your first para, I was about to suggest exactly that (well, maybe not writing your own). I find that frameworks (both front-end and back-end) constrain the LLM's choices and result in both sensible defaults and improved consistency.

Of course, you will immediately hit the problem all frameworks have: customer requirements that the framework components don't quite meet.

Still, great for RAD.

nkrisc10 days ago
If your UI is created for humans to use, you should still have humans involved in testing it.

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