Building a Personal AI Factory

Posted by derek 7/1/2025

Building a Personal AI Factory(www.john-rush.com)

266 points | 159 commentspage 3

dearilos 7/5/2025|

I'm thinking about this a little differently.

You have to catch most issues at code review.

You can have an agent spit out code, but on PR open you should have another agent verify rules based on rules you define as a team.

It's what I'm building at wispbit.

mmarian 7/2/2025||

And here I am struggling to get Claude to create a nice-looking search bar a la booking.com , with some adjustments for my personal use case; it does ok, but never gets to the end result and once I refreshed my Tailwind knowledge it felt much slower than hand coding. I feel like I'm living in a different world.

hamstergene 7/2/2025||

I think coding assistants aren't great at UI/UX yet because they can't see, their understanding of left/right/lighter/darker is guessed from textual descriptions that accompanied CSS tutorials but they are never actually imagining the looks of what they are working with. I had Cursor repeatedly fix and mess up a CSS grid, over and over again, until I switched to HTML table so that browser would handle layout. Once switched from visuals ("leftmost") to semantics ("first cell in a row") the agent immediately started getting tasks done right.

I guess keep them on backend/library tasks for now. I am sure the companies are already working on getting a snapshot of a browser page and feeding it back into multimodal model so it can comprehend what "looking" means.

mmarian 7/2/2025||

Thx for sharing your experience, good to know I'm not the only one struggling ^_^ The advice makes sense as well.

derencius 7/2/2025||

I use Claude and Cursor in parallel. cursor is doing great on the ui, I took quick screenshots to instruct the changes I wanted and it got it right.

mmarian 7/2/2025||

Cheers! It's hard to keep track of what's good for what.

petesergeant 7/2/2025||

> I keep several claude code windows open, each on its own git-worktree.

Can someone convince me they're doing their due-diligence on this code if they're using this approach? I am smart and I am experienced, and I have trouble keeping on top of the changes and subtle bugs being created by one Claude Code.

am17an 7/2/2025||

I actually don't understand how you can offload the instruction pointer of the program to another program, permanently. How are you accountable for anything then? You can't debug, you can't program, just a tourist in your own home. Own your code, even if AI wrote it.

barrenko 7/2/2025||

> Is 'Azure OpenAI subscription' cheaper than ChatGPT via OpenAI?

guicen 7/2/2025||

This "AI factory for everyone" model may be able to break resource inequality and allow people from more places to participate in truly valuable entrepreneurship.

hamish-b 7/2/2025||

This sounds great, and is similar to the workflow I get from a high level stand point with https://ampcode.com/ - albeit without the model wrangling.

To the author & anyone reading - publicly release your agent harnesses, even if its shit or vibe coded! I am constantly iterating on my meta and seeking to improve.

apwell23 7/2/2025||

ppl are getting slowly disillusioned with vibe coding.

yes AI assisted workflow might be here to stay but it won't be the magical put programmers out of job thing.

And this the best product market fit for LLMs. I imagine it will be even worse in other domains.

azan_ 7/2/2025||

Are they though? I’m seeing more and more people that used gpt4 and got substandard results get blown away with Claude code and opus once they gave it a chance. Also remember that progress has not stopped (whether it has slowed down is also controversial), so I wouldn’t make strong assumptions that ai won’t replace many devs. I hope it won’t, I really like intellectual work associated with it.

petesergeant 7/2/2025||

> ppl are getting slowly disillusioned with vibe coding.

This is the absolute polar opposite from my experience. I'm in a large non-tech community with a coders channel, and every day we get a few more Claude Code converts. I would say that vibe-coding is moving into the main-stream with experienced, professional developers who were deeply skeptical a few months ago. It's no longer fancy auto-complete: I have myself seen the magic of wishing a (low importance) front-end app into existence from scratch in an hour or so that would have taken me an order of magnitude more time beforehand.

stavros 7/2/2025|||

I don't doubt that LLMs are extremely useful for making simple things quickly. I haven't been able to get them to write hard code on their own, though. I was trying to make a sound card with a Pi Pico the other day, and had crackling and popping in the audio. I kept telling Opus to fix that, it kept being absolutely convinced it knows what the problem is every time, and went through multiple iterations of being absolutely sure it will solve the problem this time (with every time bringing a different reason for why the pops are there), and spent $35.

In the end, it had written 500 lines, the problem was still there, and the code didn't work any differently. It worries me that I don't know what those 500 lines were for.

In my experience, LLMs are amazing for writing 10-20 lines at a time, while you review and fix any errors. If I let them go to town on my code, I've found that's an expensive way to get broken code.

petesergeant 7/2/2025||

> I haven't been able to get them to write hard code on their own, though

For sure, and me neither, for what it's worth. But most of the code I write isn't "hard" code; the hard code is also the stuff I enjoy writing the most. I will note that a few months ago I found them helpful for small things inside the GPT window, and then tried agentic mode (specifically Roo, then Claude Code), and have seen a huge speedup in my ability to get stuff done.

stavros 7/2/2025||

Agreed, I no longer have to write the same code for the Nth time, or spend two minutes times a hundred looking up API docs. I love it.

apwell23 7/2/2025||

> write the same code for the Nth time

who does this though ? maybe you should extract that into a library/method/abstraction ?

apwell23 7/2/2025||||

oh yea thats true. I was talking more about ppl who have been vibe coding for a while.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1loj3a0/this_pret...

c4pt0r 7/2/2025||

Maybe a bit off-topic, but the minimalist style of the blog looks really cool.

nico 7/2/2025|

> If you know Factorio you know it’s all about building a factory that can produce itself

This is a very interesting concept

Could this be extended to the point of an LLM producing/improving itself?

If not, what are the current limitations to get to that point?

NitpickLawyer 7/2/2025|

> Could this be extended to the point of an LLM producing/improving itself?

Check out aider writing aider stats here: https://aider.chat/HISTORY.html

nico 7/2/2025||

Super interesting, thank you for the link

Aider writing its own code is definitely cool and within the same concept

I’d love to see an LLM or some sort of coding model that modifies/trains the model itself

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