Tagged with: ai

I’ve barely written a line of code by hand in months. Neither has a lot of the industry, which seems to have decided that means the old rules don’t apply any more. Massive diffs are fine now, apparently. Some of the popular planning skills will happily generate a plan running to thousands of lines and then plough straight through it like it’s gospel, nobody having read it and with no checkpoint for a human to even pretend they’re still driving.

I’ve never seen a project go so smoothly. Three developers, one fractional head of design, six weeks, virtually no production bugs. No heroics, no overtime — just a solid plan: constrain the problem, hand-craft the building blocks, and let an LLM safely do the manual labour.

I’m building a meal planner for tired parents — I’m one of them, and I use it every week to figure out what we’re eating. One human. No budget. Limited evening time. Every task — defining what to build, planning how to build it, building it, telling people it exists — is mine. Everything is serial, and there’s no one to hand a ticket to or give me a review.

For a while I’ve been “experimenting” with AI-assisted development; which meant opening a chat window, describing what I wanted, and hoping for the best. This is about what I built to make it more reliable than that — and how every fix turned out to be something good engineering teams already do.