This is real, but (at least in a coding context) easily preventable. Just append "don't assume you're wrong - investigate" or something to that effect. Annoying, but usually effective.
I've been using opencode and oh-my-opencode with Claude's models (via github Copilot). The last two or three months feel like they have been the most productive of my 28-year career. It's very good indeed with Rails code, I suspect it has something to do with the intentional expressiveness of Ruby plus perhaps some above-average content that it would be trained on for this language and framework. Or maybe that's just my bias.
It takes a bit of hand holding and multiple loops to get things right sometimes, but even with that, it's pretty damn good. I don't usually walk away from it, I actively monitor what it's doing, peek in on the sub-agents, and interject when it goes down a wrong path or writes messy code. But more often than not, it goes like this:
- Point at a GH issue or briefly describe the task
- Either ask it to come up with a plan, or just go straight to implementation
- When done, run *multiple* code review loops with several dedicated code review agents - one for idiomatic Rails code, one for maintainabilty, one for security, and others as needed
These review loops are essential, they help clean up the code into something coherent most times. It really mirrors how I tend to approach tasks myself: Write something quickly that works, make it robust by adding tests, and then make it maintainable by refactoring. Just way faster.
I've been using this approach on a side project, and even though it's only nights an weekends, it's probably the most robust, well-tested and polished solo project I've ever built. All those little nice-to-have and good-to-great things that normally fall by the wayside if you only have nights and weekends - all included now.
And the funny thing is - I feel coding with AI like this gets me in the zone more than hand-coding. I suspect it's the absence of all those pesky rabbit holes that tend to be thrown up by any non-trivial code base and tool chain which can easily distract us from thinking about the problem domain and instead solving problems of our tools. Claude deals with all that almost as a side effect. So while it does its thing, I read through it's self-talk while thinking along about the task at hand, intervening if I disagree, but I stay at the higher level of abstraction, more or less. Only when the task is basically done do I dive a level deeper into code organisation, maintainability, security, edge cases, etc. etc.
Needless to say that very good test coverage is essential to this approach.
Now, I'm very ambiguous about the AI bubble, I believe very firmly that it is one, but for coding specifically, it's a paradigm shift, and I hope it's here to stay.
> manufacturing a sense of urgency, this is especially bad if you try to sustain this state all indefinitely
Sadly, I have seen this in almost every startup led by founders without an engineering background I've ever been a part of.
In my personal experience, this is often caused by overeager sales team promising the world for the next deal, only to fob it off to the engineering team who now "urgently" need to build "features" and "work hard" to make it happen. This is when your intrinsically motivated engineers start looking for the exit.
Really conflicted on this one. On the one hand, having to pay for N+1 streaming services because none of my N favourite shows are on any one of them sucks. On the other hand, monopoly.
Netflix stopped being the good(/least bad) guys a while ago.
They've been raising prices relentlessly, banning casting, criminalizing account sharing (which THEY started by introducing profiles)… They're just as selfish and consumer-hostile as most other big companies.
SportsKey | Ruby on Rails Developer | Remote, Dublin, Ireland | Full Time
Sports facilities are lying idle during the day all over the world. One key reason for this is because people can’t find and book their local sports facilities online.
At SportsKey, we aim to fix this problem by providing easy to use sports facility management and online booking technology that makes it simple for venues to manage and promote their sports facilities online. This results in a dramatic reduction in admin and increased revenue for the venue and more people playing sport.
We're looking for junior to mid-level Ruby on Rails developers to grow our team. 100% remote if you want. GMT +/- 3 hours is ideal.
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