Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

I feel like I’m in your camp, to my own surprise.

I’ll try my hand at some guidelines: the prime directive would be “use the right ai tool for the right task”. Followed by “use a statically typed language”. Followed by “express yourself precisely in English. You need to be able to write like a good technical lead and a good product manager.”

With those out of the way:

Completions work when you’re doing lots of rote moderately difficult work within established patterns. Otherwise, turn them off, they’ll get in the way. When they do work, their entire point is to extend your stamina.

Coding agents work when at-worst a moderately novel vertical needs implementation. New architecture and patterns need to be described exhaustively with accurate technical language. Split up the agents work into the same sort of chunks that you would do between coffee breaks. Understand that while the agent will make you 5x faster, you’ll still need to put in real work. Get it right the first time. Misuse the agent and straightening out the mistakes will cost more time than if you hadn’t used the agent at all.

If novelty or complexity is high, use an advanced reasoning model as interactive documentation, a sparring partner, and then write the code by hand. Then ask the reasoning model to critique your code viciously. Have the reasoning model configured for this role beforehand.

These things together have added up to the biggest force multiplier I’ve encountered in my career.

I’m very much open to other heuristics.

> If novelty or complexity is high, use an advanced reasoning model as interactive documentation, a sparring partner, and then write the code by hand. Then ask the reasoning model to critique your code viciously. Have the reasoning model configured for this role beforehand.

Does this mean basically "Opus"? What goes into "Have the reasoning model configured for this role beforehand."?