> The people really leading AI coding right now (and I’d put myself near the front, though not all the way there)

So humble. Who is he again?

For anyone who says you don’t need to look at code to code, I’d encourage you to look at this code: https://github.com/benjaminshoemaker/benshoemaker-us

Or simply look at the Astro blog, which is still showing the default Astro favicon.

I say this not to discourage anyone. Building a blog—or any app—is a huge accomplishment, and you should be proud. In particular, if you’re sharing what you’ve learned and sharing your code publicly, you’re already ahead of the majority of people on this journey.

What I’d encourage you to do is keep doing what you’re doing. The best way to learn to build software is to build software. The more you do, the more you learn.

turning a big dial taht says "Psychosis" on one side and "Wishful thinking" on the other and constantly looking back at the LinkedIn audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right

Why have a spec when I have the concrete implementation and a system ready and willing to answer any questions I have about it? I don't understand why people value an artifact that can be out of sync with reality over the actual reality. The LLM can answer questions based on the code. We might drift away from needing a code editor, but I likely won't be drifting to reading specs in a world where I can converse with the deployed implementation.

I have always thought that AI code generation is an irresistible attraction for those personalities who lack the technical skills or knowledge necessary for programming, but nevertheless feel undeservedly like geniuses. This post is proof of that.

Also, the generated picture in this post makes me want to kick someone in the nuts. It doesn't explain anything.

Yeah, the revenge of waterfall, specs documents for AI agents.

I don't get it. Can't you just open Claude Code in another terminal? I had like 5 open yesterday.

I haven't used Codex though, so maybe there's something I'm missing about the parallel-ness of it here.

> Here’s the thing: I don’t read code anymore. I used to write code and read code. Now when something isn’t working, I don’t go look at the code.

Recently I picked a smallish task from our backlog. This is some code I'm not familiar with, frontend stuff I wouldn't tackle normally.

Claude wrote something. I tested, it didn't work. I explained the issue. It added a bunch of traces, asked me to collect the logs, figured out a fix, submitted the change.

Got bunch of linter errors that I don't understand, and that I copied and pasted to Claude. It fixed something, but still got lint errors, which Claude dismissed as irrelevant, but I realized I wasn't happy with the new behavior.

After 3 days of iteration, my change seems ok, passed the CI, the linters, and automatic review.

At that stage, I have no idea if this is the right way to fix the problem, and if it breaks something, I won't be able to fix it myself as I'm clueless. Also, it could be that a human reviewer tells me it's totally wrong, or ask me questions I won't be able to answer.

Not only, this process wasn't fun at all, but I also didn't learn anything, and I may introduce technical debt which AI may not be able to fix.

I agree that coding agents can boost efficiency in some cases, but I don't see a shift left of IDEs at that stage.

Spec is too low level in my experience. The graph continues far further to the left.

I tried doing clean room reimplementations from specs, and just ended up with even worse garbage. Cause it kept all the original garbage and bloated it further!

Giving it a description of what you're actually trying to do works way better. Then it finds the most elegant solution to the problem, both in terms of the code and the UI design.

I don't like the craft of the app. There are a few moments that really left me feeling it wasn't 100 percent thought through like cursor is at this point.