Discussion
My AI-Assisted workflow
imiric: Why is everyone compelled to write one of these articles? Do they think that their workflow is so unique that they've unlocked the secret to harnessing the power of a pattern generator? Every single one of these reads like influencer vomit.My workflow hasn't changed since 2022: 1. Send some data. 2. Review response. 3. Fix response until I'm satisfied. 4. Goto 1.
arnvald: Nobody writes about their work thinking the whole world will read it. They write it for their friends, maybe a small group of regular readers, also for themselves. I for one really like it, even if I get bored after reading 5 similar articles, because maybe someone will only ever read one of them, and it’ll help them improve their own work.
Brajeshwar: It is OK. I actually love looking around other people’s work. Perhaps, I will never follow exactly but one a while, I get the gotchas where I can steal and adapt to mine. Let it be, let people express. If not for the veterans with years of experience, people coming in recently should find these things something to read up and learn.
nDRDY: Here's mine: code to spec until I get stuck -> search Google for the answer -> scan the Gemini result instead of going to StackOverflow.
pydry: >What is AI actually good at? Implementation. What is it genuinely bad at? Figuring out what you actually wantI've found it to be pretty bad at both.If what you're doing is quite cookie cutter though it can do a passable job of figuring out what you want.
stratts: I'm still finding that no matter how much planning I do, how much directing, how much refactoring, I still feel the urge to delete everything the AI has written and rewrite it from scratch myself.There's nothing wrong with the code, really. It functions well, and some things like error handling are genuinely more thorough than I would do myself. It just irrationally annoys me.Of course I'm not in the position to rewrite anything for various reasons, so I just deal.
zkmon: Congrats! You just rediscovered something called water-fall model.
senko: Did you know that agile is just waterfall scaled down to two weeks? Now you know!
FairlySadPanda: No /s here so just in case this is a serious point:Agile is a set of four principles for software development.Scrum is the two-week development window thing, but Scrum doesn't mandate a two week _release_ window, it mandates a two week cadence of planning and progress review with a focus on doing small chunks of achievable work rather than mega-projects.Scrum prefers lots of one-to-three day projects generally, I've yet to see training on Scrum that does not warn off of repeatedly picking up two-week jobs. If that's been your experience, you should review how you can break work down more to get to "done" on bits of it faster.
gbrindisi: This is pretty much a spec driven workflow.I do similar, but my favorite step is the first: /rubberduck to discuss the problem with the agent, who is instructed by the command to help me frame and validate it. Hands down the most impactful piece of my workflow, because it helps me achieve the right clarity and I can use it also for non coding tasks.After which is the usual: write PRDs, specs, tasks and then build and then verify the output.I started with one the spec frameworks and eventually simplify everything to the bone.I do feel it’s working great but someday I fear a lot of this might still be too much productivity theater.
senko: I think most of us are ending up with a similar workflow.Mine is: 1) discuss the thing with an agent; 2) iterate on a plan until i'm happy (reviewing carefully); 3) write down the spec; 4) implement (tests first); 5) manually verify that it works as expected; 6) review (another agent and/or manually) + mutation testing (to see what we missed with tests); 7) update docs or other artifacts as needed; 8) doneNo frameworks, no special tools, works across any sufficiently capable agent, I scale it down for trivial tasks, or up (multi-step plans) as needed.The only thing that I haven't seen widely elsewhere (yet) is mutation testing part. The (old) idea is that you change the codebase so that you check your tests catch the bugs. This was usually done with fuzzers, but now I can just tell the LLM to introduce plausible-looking bugs.
Bossie: My workflow is also highly inspired by Matt's skills, but I'm leveraging Linear instead of Github./grill-me (back-and-forth alignment with the LLM) --> /write-a-prd (creates project under an initative in Linear) --> /prd-to-issues (creates issues at the project level). I'm making use of the blockedBy utility when registering the issues. They land in the 'Ready for Agent' status.A scheduled project-orchestrator is then picking up issues with this status leveraging subagents. A HITL (Human in the loop) status is set on the ticket when anything needs my attention. I consider the code as the 'what', so I let the agent(s) update the issues with the HOW and WHY. All using Claude Code Max subscription.Some notes:- write-a-prd is knowledge compression and thus some important details occasionally get lost- The UX for the orchestrator flow is suboptimal. Waiting for this actually: https://github.com/mattpocock/sandcastle/issues/191#issuecom...- I might have to implement a simplify + review + security audit, call it a 'check', to fire at the end of the project. Could be in the form of an issue.
senko: All good points here (and yeah I didn't add /s, hopefully "now you know!" was sufficiently obvious over-the-top).All that said, in most orgs I've worked with, they were following agile processes over agile principles - effectively a waterfall with a scrum-master and dailies.This is not to diss the idea of agile, just an observation that most good ideas, once through the business process MBA grinder, end up feeling quite different.
