This is the hardest it's ever going to be. That's been my mode for the last year. A lot of what I did in the last month was complete science fiction as little as six months ago. The scope and quality of what is possible seems to leap ahead every few weeks.

I now have several projects going in languages that I've never used. I have a side project in Rust, and two Go projects. I have a few decades experience with backend development in Java, Kotlin (last ten years) and occasionally python. And some limited experience with a few other languages. I know how to structurer backend projects, what to look for, what needs testing, etc.

A lot of people would insist you need to review everything the AI generates. And that's very sensible. Except AI now generates code faster than I can review it. Our ability to review is now the bottleneck. And when stuff kind of works (evidenced by manual and automated testing), what's the right point to just say it's good enough? There are no easy answers here. But you do need to think about what an acceptable level of due diligence is. Vibe coding is basically the equivalent of blindly throwing something at the wall and seeing what sticks. Agentic engineering is on the opposite side of the spectrum.

I actually emphasize a lot of quality attributes in my prompts. The importance of good design, high cohesiveness, low coupling, SOLID principles, etc. Just asking for potential refactoring with an eye on that usually yields a few good opportunities. And then all you need to do is say "sounds good, lets do it". I get a little kick out of doing variations on silly prompts like that. "Make it so" is my favorite. Once you have a good plan, it doesn't really matter what you type.

I also ask critical questions about edge cases, testing the non happy path, hardening, concurrency, latency, throughput, etc. If you don't, AIs kind of default to taking short cuts, only focus on the happy path, or hallucinate that it's all fine, etc. But this doesn't necessarily require detailed reviews to find out. You can make the AI review code and produce detailed lists of everything that is wrong or could be improved. If there's something to be found, it will find it if you prompt it right.

There's an art to this. But I suspect that that too is going to be less work. A lot of this stuff boils down to evolving guardrails to do things right that otherwise go wrong. What if AIs start doing these things right by default? I think this is just going to get better and better.

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jaccola 4 hours ago | parent [-]

But why are you making projects in so many languages? The language is very rarely the barrier to performance, especially if you don't even understand the language.

	▲	jillesvangurp an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I try to pick the language best to the situation rather than giving into my own biases. I need to broaden my horizon to be able to cover the full stack of stuff that I need, not just the things I've been doing myself a lot for years. There's a lot of stuff that used to be out of my comfort zone that I can now tackle easily. Stepping over my own biases is part of that. I know not everybody is quite ready for this yet. But I'm working from the point of view that I won't be manually programming much professionally anymore. So, I now pick stuff I know AIs supposedly do well (like Go) with good solid tool and library ecosystems. I can read it well enough; it's not a hard language and I've seen plenty other languages. But I'm clearly not going to micro manage a Go code base any time soon. The first time I did this, it was an experiment. I wanted to see how far I could push the notion. I actually gave it some thought and then I realized that if I was going to do this manually I would pick what I always pick. But I just wasn't planning to do this manually and it wasn't optimal for the situation. It just wasn't a valid choice anymore. Then I repeated the experiment again on a bigger thing and I found that I could have a high level discussion about architectural choices well enough that it did not really slow me down much. The opposite actually. I just ask critical questions. I try to make sure to stick with mainstream stuff and not get boxed into unnecessary complexity. A few decades in this industry has given me a nose for that. My lack of familiarity with the code base is so far not proving to be any issue. Early days, I know. But I'm generating an order of magnitude more code than I'll ever be able to review already and this is only going to escalate from here on. I don't see a reason for me to slow down. To be effective, I need to engineer at a macro level. I simply can't afford to micro manage code bases anymore. That means orchestrating good guard rails, tests, specifications, etc. and making sure those cover everything I care about. Precisely because I don't want to have to open an editor and start fixing things manually. As for Rust, that was me not thinking about my prompt too hard and it had implemented something half decent by the time I realized so I just went with it. To be clear, this one is just a side project. So, I let it go (out of curiosity) and it seems to be fine as well. Apparently, I can do Rust now too. It's actually not a bad choice objectively and so far so good. The thing is, I can change my mind and redo the whole thing from scratch and it would not be that expensive if I had to.