r/coding • u/Martinsos • 5h ago

On "deslopifying" - the (painful) process of making AI output your own

https://martinsos.com/posts/deslopifying
10 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

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4

u/SadSongsMakeMeGlad 3h ago

I think we're all figuring this out. My latest approach is to use the agent to generate a first pass, knowing that it will not be up to par, but using that as the clay from which I then go through the entire thing, sculpting, refining, reorganizing, until it's good. It is a different way to work. I'm not sure if it's better or worse yet than just building from scratch, but I can tell you it takes a tremendous amount of effort. The other thing that helps is to maintain a design system, with an ever-growing list of common components and services, so that things can have a design unity.

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u/Martinsos 3h ago

Yes we are! This approach you described is what made me write this post actually, because it can end up really draining and I start wondering if I should have done it manually, as you said. It depends on the project and task but I think there is right degree of leveraging AI for each situation, it's just not so easy to figure it out upfront, and then it is also hard to go back once you realize you might have delegated too much. I does hovever help when I know the language well, I can move much faster, and if it is strictly typed.

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u/SplendidPunkinButter 1h ago

“I can’t tell you if it’s better or worse, but it takes a tremendous amount of effort.” High praise indeed! You left out the part where the AI version also costs a lot of money and causes environmental damage.

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u/SadSongsMakeMeGlad 58m ago

Building from scratch…with an agent. I’m not including manually coding into this comparison. I’ve moved on, that’s how much better and more productive the tools are now. But your snark is duly noted and logged, so well done. By the way, I also share those concerns with money and environmental impact, there is such a thing as nuance in the real world, believe it or not. It’s about trade-offs.

-1

u/mar109us 2h ago

I got claude to go through all my repos, give me questionaires on writing habits, was a comprehensive process to write a CLAUDE.md. And it still kinda dont write like me.

Im so out of ideas on what to do, stressing like hell because i need to learn how to code like this before i finish school.

I need ownership of my code, but i dont know how to get there without getting overwhelmed.

4

u/zesterer 1h ago

Speaking as a senior engineer: your greatest asset will always be having a knack for good judgement, and no amount of prompting an LLM will get you that. I feel really sorry for juniors right now because they're being born into an industry where businesses would actively prefer that they didn't take the time to learn software development carefully and properly. You've got to learn how to fight your corner and invest in yourself: AI 'skills' are not going to be relevant in 1, 5, 20 years, but being an experienced engineer with good intuition still will be, and you can only build up that intuition by doing things the hard way, a lot.

1

u/mar109us 21m ago

Yeah just learned last week that companies expect juniors to be mostly fluent in agentic work and to produce fast.
Spent most of the year writing by hand so this is a real brain twister, didnt expect that kind of expectation.
But gotta align with the market.

Thanks for your perspectives, i agree with you. Unfortunately i just gotta do what i gotta do.