Adaptation: new tools in town!

It was about a year ago. I was getting bombarded with LLMs in my editor. It started with VSCode offering code snippets as random auto complete suggestions. I hated them. They were mostly dumb, confused me and now I actually had to think deeper before accepting a suggestion because they actually could be subtly broken code. Then, very occasionally but at an increasing frequency, the suggestions started to understand my intent and predict my actual next step. That was oddly satisfying¹. Even worked on my blog posts since I write these in markdown in my editor. Then came the inline ask mode where I asked it to do a very boring and repetitive task. It did it quite well and quite inefficiently. I could have used ast-grep for that but, that also costs a lot of brain tokens y’know? Cramer gave us all Cursor access and encouraged us to try. Syntax podcast was full of episodes of comparing Cursor to Copilot to Windsurf, my new colleague Miguel seemed to be cranking out big patches with AI (they did have some silly stuff in it but overall, they were good) and I still couldn’t get myself to use it. Don’t get me wrong, I did try many times. The issue was, it felt like trying to work with a thick but self-assured person getting all the core concepts wrong. I kept hearing people talking about generating a plan or a todo list for the agents to follow and I was thinking “The reason I became a software engineer is because I’m lazy. If I’m gonna write down how to do it exactly, I might as well do it myself, and better²”.

Then, during one school break trip came that fateful moment. I was too tired to actually code and the code that needed to be written was quite tedious. I needed to parse stdout of random processes, fuzzy match them with logs I might have been receiving and do more stuff accordingly.³ But again, I was tired and even if I wasn’t, stdout plumbing with random processes is as fun as a root canal⁴. At that point I said “screw it, I won’t be able to get this done and I already planned it out in my head. I can dump it to Cursor and see where it goes with it.” Turns out Cursor added the “plan mode” around the same time. See, you don’t have to write the plan, the AI can write the plan for you and execute it too! Believe it or not, it one-shotted the entire patch and probably better than what my first pass would have been. I was excited, dumbstruck, curious, furious, and everything in between. I threw more problems to it and just kept getting good results. I also got a lot of literal heat though! Don’t know why⁵ but despite the model running in the cloud, just the agent loop itself was making my laptop sweat⁶.

This was only the beginning though. A few months later, on another school break trip⁷, a wild Pokémon build in cloud feature appeared! This was a game changer and became my other breaking point. Building in cloud means my computer becomes free after the planning session. Which means the only bottleneck is now the planning phase. And that, my friends, is the actual force multiplier. The real productivity gain that people have been talking about. See, even if the AI does a slightly worse job than myself, I can now practically work on many things in parallel through delegation. I started to realize there was a hidden PM in me! 😱

I rapidly started throwing GitHub issues and ideas at it, generating plans and then offloading to cloud build agents. For some silly reason, the planning phase is restricted to the local computer but it’s not a deal breaker. To review the code generated by AI, I decided to use draft PRs on GitHub as it is a much nicer experience than my editor. It also only involves switching tabs rather than Git branches. The only issue is, now I look like a mad man arguing with himself on the PRs, publicly 😅⁸. I created this “skill”, telling my agent to fix CI builds and address all review comments until there are none. This was bliss. I even bought a foldable phone⁹ so I can review these PRs easily on the go and keep the agents busy! I was hooked. I was shipping like crazy and I was checking my phone frequently to see my likes on Instagram my agents’ progress. And then, just like it came out of nowhere, “build on cloud” went to nowhere. “The Lord giveth, The Lord taketh away” I guess. Back were the dark days of being stuck with a single task and a loud and hot laptop.

That’s when I decided to build my ultimate setup. But that, friends, is the topic of my next post.

Footnotes

1. And creepy. ↩

2. With blackjack and hookers. ↩

3. This was the first prototype of spotlight run ↩

4. Ironically, I found it very exciting for the very first time! ↩

5. Hi Norah Jones. ↩

6. Well, more like boil, probably the biggest contributor to my thermal paste sputtering around the die. ↩

7. Yes, we have so many school breaks. No, I don’t know exactly why. ↩

8. Because the bot uses my own credentials for the PR through gh ↩

9. Pixel 10 Pro Fold. Yup, that’s a mouthful and is quite expensive but was okay with a trade-in with my old phone. ↩