Three struggles with AI coding agents
Hope you're finding some calm in the midst of the storm. A few observations about struggles folks are having with LLMs / Claude Code.
Tired of the Claude Code hacks
I think I'm officially overwhelmed by the number of people sharing their bespoke Claude Code plugins, skills, agents.md, harness, etc., on social media. Everyone has a system. All I want is something simple that actually works.
I've been really happy with Brian Casel's philosophy. When I asked about this in his Builder Methods discord, he replied:
Generally, I believe that people's opinionated packaging of their own systems is just noise and adds complexity. I'm more interested in [building] our own systems that fit our own mental models, team/org culture, etc.
So far, I've mostly stuck to using Claude Code's TUI with a simple claude.md file. I'm also getting it to record daily "what we did today" journals in a history/ folder.
Aside: so much of these "LLM productivity hacks" feels similar to other productivity hype cycles we've seen – like when everyone got obsessed with Notion.
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Don't be a feature creep
LLMs make it easy for anyone to add new features to the product. Even before AI, teams were battling feature creep, where the product becomes increasingly complex, bloated, and cluttered.
On X, Dax Raad posted this internal memo from Open Code's team chat:
He said:
"Everything great comes from being able to delay gratification for as long as possible, and it feels like we're collectively losing our ability to do that."
I'm hearing from lots of teams that are struggling with this!
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Prompt Claude Code... watch a video?
Loved this bit from Caleb Porzio's latest episode:
It starts with: "Oh, I really need AI to help me with this thing. Oh, it's taking too long. Okay, I'll open YouTube." Right?
But how it ends is you're like, "Oh, I really wanna get something prompted so that I can watch YouTube while something else works." You know? It's just this knee-jerk reaction.
It's like, oh, I just want the relief. I just wanna watch, like, a golf video, a comedy video, a physics video, or some guy making a magnetic hoverboard.
So I've been restraining myself pretty hard. I'm gonna have to institute some sort of ban on all forms of consumption during the workday, or something, because it's just too damn tempting when you have all these prompts going and nothing else to do.
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How are you doing in all of this?
Let me know,
Justin Jackson
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