[gchadwick]

Anyone else find reading things like this slightly exhausting?

I'm very much pro AI for coding there are clearly significant capabilities there but I'm still getting my head around how to best utilise it.

Posts like these make it sound like ruthlessly optimizing your workflow letting no possible efficiency go every single day is the only way to work now. This has always been possible and generally not a good idea to focus on exclusively. There's always been processes to optimise and automate and always a balance as to which to pursue.

Personally I am incorporating AI into my daily work but not getting too bogged down by it. I read about some of the latest ideas and techniques and choose carefully which I employ. Sometimes I'll try and AI workflow and then abandon it. I recently connected Claude up to draw.io with an MCP, it had some good capabilities but for the specific task I wanted it wasn't really getting it so doing it manually was the better choice to achieve what I wanted in good time.

The models themselves and coding harnesses are also evolving quickly complex workflows people may put together can quickly become pointless.

More haste, less speed as they say!

[yomismoaqui]

Don't worry so much about spee. Some people obsess over it and don't realize they are running in the wrong direction.

[nnx]

Why do you think it's "the wrong direction" ?

[malux85]

I know people like this, theres a form of procrastination where they are busy hyperoptimising their todo lists and workflows but getting only a tiny amount of actual work done. It's a form of the disconnected intellect - they can tell you the problem, they can even tell you the solution, but they can't turn that knowledge into action. Convincing themselves that utterly trivial inconveniences are so productivity and or psychologically harmful they can they can then rationalize all this "meta-work" while simultaneously claiming to be virtuous, when in reality it's usually insecurity in their abilities or cowardice to face the unknown, preventing them doing real work

[sublinear]

I almost agree with you, but with regard to this specific blog I'm not sure I can.

From my perspective, all this energy spent on AI prompting is actually just planning meetings and whiteboarding in disguise, but since all that has the bad reputation of luring devs into power struggles and yak shaving this is the new way.

It's likely where most of their improved productivity is coming from. The people doing the meta-work just need be mature about it to avoid procrastinating.

[quintu5]

Yeah, AI generated diagrams can be pretty hit or miss. The lack of good quality examples in training data and minimal documentation for these tools can make it difficult for models to even get basic syntax correct for more complex diagrams.

I’ve had a lot of success dogfooding my own product, the Mermaid Studio plugin for JetBrains IDEs (https://mermaidstudio.dev).

It combines the deep semantic code intelligence of an IDE with a suite of integrated MCP tools that your preferred agent can plug into for static analysis, up to date syntax, etc.

I basically tell Claude Code to run the generated diagram through the analysis tool, fix issues it detects and repeat until fixed. Then generate a png or svg for a visual inspection before finalizing the diagram.

Now all of my planning and architecture docs are filled with illustrative flowcharts, sequence diagrams, and occasionally block diagrams for workshopping proposed UI layouts

[PunchyHamster]

Nope, but I do find it revolting.