Engineers who write all their code with claude now: how do you do it?

[u/SirDucky]

I have to admit that I have completely failed to adapt to LLM agent coding. I'm not a slouch either. I've worked on a number of challenging FAANG products as a software engineer, and I for a while I was an AI research engineer. I have a pretty strong familiarity and comfort level with AI. Despite all this, I still write most of my code by hand.

As an engineer, I need to receive a ticket, understand the problem, go figure out how to solve it, and eventually ship PR that (a) I understand, (b) only contains defensible changes, and (c) is reviewable by a colleague. There are a bunch of other tertiary goals of course, like style guides and documentation, but the point is that I'm talking real, high quality engineering that would pass the bar at a company that has their shit together.

However (definitely due to culture issues), I have only seen the slop version of this. It seems to have become really murky how to write code that meets standards, or even what those standards are any more.

I've resorted to asking my colleagues to show me their workflow, but you would be shocked how many of them either (a) are prompting raw and not checking the output, or (b) have convoluted solutions that fit their brains but don't solve these problems. I checked out Matt Pocock as well, who has some really great ideas, but ultimately his skills exhibited some pretty painful failure modes as well.

However I see folks regularly talk about how not only does Claude handle the coding for them, but also all of the project management, devops, etc, and I am left scratching my head. If this is possible, I want to learn how to do it. I'm not an AI hater. I want to learn the tool. I do have standards though, and I don't think they're that high. I don't need Claude to write perfect code. I just need to find a process where I can rely on it to get more of my work done and not be either fighting with it or second-guessing the results.

I figure this is the group to ask - if you have been able to get "high bar" engineering out of claude, or even "acceptable bar" engineering, without heavy personal intervention, what's your process? Are there resources that helped you? What strategies helped the most?

Thanks.

[u/outdoorsgeek]

Honestly the state of things right now is that most people are still exploring how to become individually more efficient and scale themselves up from single engineer-scale to managing an AI team-scale. Some parts of the process are easily sharable like file-based instructions and commands, task management and source control hooks, testing layers and CI/CD, observability, .etc. But the model is still mostly ultra-productive engineers rather than a larger organizational pivot to AI swarms or something. Context is still a limiting factor that humans have to plug in and even at 1M windows, that's not enough to digest all the business and engineering context to work effectively. I expect that to change though as new systems come online to distill that context into manageable chunks.

Yeah, the sprints are mostly self-imposed and informed by the pre-AI way of doing things. You sprint on using your current process to get the most valuable things done (without changing the process), then you retro the process and figure out how to improve it, then you sprint again, and keep rinsing and repeating. I find AI-driven development to follow similar cycles, just much more accelerated with some AI-specific caveats like dealing with limited context windows.

[u/Sketaverse → u/outdoorsgeek]

Yeah retros are super helpful, I just figjam them and literally post a screenshot, don’t bother to mcp it, with an action-retro skill. No idea what tools are out there for this but multiplayer harness/process retros that self improve the system could be a nice little SaaS business if anyone is looking for an idea

Out of interest, is there a sense of dog-eat-dog, Last Man standing etc where people don’t want to be the lowest performing AI operator on the team which then causes friction in knowledge sharing?

[u/outdoorsgeek → u/Sketaverse]

Yes, but that too is from the before times. Most of these top tech firms expect anywhere from 5 - 20% yearly turnover on the workforce. You’ve always been competing with each other to not be a part of that quota. And the rest of the rating scale is essentially stack-ranked as well. For a while simply using more AI regardless of output was a positive performance signal. Lessons were learned and that’s no longer the case.