One of my favorite things is that I no longer feel like I need to keep up with "framework of the year"
I came up over a decade ago, places I worked were heavy on Java and Spring. Frontends were Jquery back then. Since then I've moved around positions quite a bit, many different frameworks, but typically service side rendered MVC types and these days I work as an SRE. The last 5 years I've fiddled with frontend frameworks and SPAs but never really got into it. I just don't have it in me to learn ANOTHER framework.
I had quite a few projects, all using older patterns/frameworks/paradigms. Unfortunately these older paradigms don't lend themselves to "serverless" architecture. So when I want to actually run and deploy something I've gotta deploy it to a server (or ecs task). That shit starts to cost a bit of money, so I've never been able to keep projects running very long... typically because the next idea comes up and I start working on that and decide to spend money on the new things.
I've been working at a cloud native shop the last 7 years now. Damn, you can run shit CHEAP in AWS if you know what you're doing. I know what I'm doing for parts of that, using dynamodb instead of rds, lambdas instead of servers. But I could never get far enough with modern frontend frameworks to actually migrate my apps to these patterns.
Well, now it's easy.
"Hey Claude, look at this repo here, I want to move it to AWS lambdas + apigw + cloudfront. Break the frontend out into a SPA using vue3. I've copied some other apps and patterns {here} so go view those for how to do it"
And that's just the start.
I never thought I'd get into game development but it's opened that up to me as well (though, since I'm not an artist professionally I have issues getting generative AI to make assets, so I'm stuck plodding along in aseprite and photoshop make shit graphics lol). I've got one simple game like 80% done and ideas for the next one.
I never got too far down mobile development either. But one of the apps I made it could be super useful to have a mobile app. Describe the ux/ui/user flow, tell it where to find the api endpoints, and wham bam, android app developed.
Does it make perfect code one shot? Sometimes, but not often, I'll have to nudge it along. Does it make good architectural decisions? Not often on its own, again, I'l nudge it, or even better, I'll spin up another agent to do code reviews and feed the reviews back into the agent building out the app. Keep doing that loop until I feel like the code review agent is really reaching or being too nitpicky.
And holy shit, I've been able to work on multiple things at the same time this way. Like completely different domains, just have different agents running and doing work.
I've had the same type of experience where I feel like the knowledge barrier for a lot of projects has been made much smaller than it used to be :D
btw, I have a couple of questions just out of curiosity: What tools do you use besides Claude? Do you have a local or preferred setup? and do you know of any communities where discussion about LLM/general AI tool use is the focus, amongst programmers/ML engineers? Been trying to be more informed as to what tools are out there and more up to date on this field that is progressing very quickly.
Claude is my favorite and at work it's what we officially use. At home I pay for claude by the token but I have a gemini and chatgpt account. So at home I use a lot more gemini cli and codex.
For my setup, I make sure I have good markdown files and I use beads. I'll usually have an AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md in every project and 99.9% of the time they're the exact same. I always make sure to keep these files up to date. If the LLM does something I don't like and I can foresee it being a problem, I'll add it to the markdown file as something not to do.
My markdown files generally have multiple sections. There's always a good chunk describing the app (or in a non software case, the goal or purpose). Some design/architecture decisions will make it into the markdown files. How to build/test are in the markdown files.
I think it helps that I already have good patterns and structure to most things I build. I have moved more to a monorepo since LLMs came out. So an android app won't be in a separate repo as the webapp, instead they're all in the same repo with different directories (frontend vs {app}-android/{app}-iphone/{app}-mobile). Everything I build gets deployed to AWS and I have good patterns for that. Make for builds/deploys/tests, I don't ever run terraform or npm or maven or any other builds on the cli, if I'm running it it goes in the Makefile. All apps follow the same Makefile patterns where certain commands all get rolled up into the same one (make plan, make build, make deploy) using the same general env vars.
Now for tools and such, I feel like just the cli agents themselves are it. On personal stuff that's 100% all I use, the cli agent. At work I integrate with some MCPs and I've created and use some skills/plugins, but tbh I don't feel like they make a big difference or are necessary. I think the non-deterministic nature of the tool makes these unnecessary. Like sometimes I have to explicitly tell the agent to use the MCP. Sometimes the MCP takes up more context than having the llm create a script to hit and API and recreate the MCP's functionality.
And when I have questions, like you did here, I ask the llms first. I ask a lot of "meta" questions to the llm in my sessions even. I like to think it primes it for going down the path you want.
One of my favorite things is that I no longer feel like I need to keep up with "framework of the year"
I came up over a decade ago, places I worked were heavy on Java and Spring. Frontends were Jquery back then. Since then I've moved around positions quite a bit, many different frameworks, but typically service side rendered MVC types and these days I work as an SRE. The last 5 years I've fiddled with frontend frameworks and SPAs but never really got into it. I just don't have it in me to learn ANOTHER framework.
I had quite a few projects, all using older patterns/frameworks/paradigms. Unfortunately these older paradigms don't lend themselves to "serverless" architecture. So when I want to actually run and deploy something I've gotta deploy it to a server (or ecs task). That shit starts to cost a bit of money, so I've never been able to keep projects running very long... typically because the next idea comes up and I start working on that and decide to spend money on the new things.
I've been working at a cloud native shop the last 7 years now. Damn, you can run shit CHEAP in AWS if you know what you're doing. I know what I'm doing for parts of that, using dynamodb instead of rds, lambdas instead of servers. But I could never get far enough with modern frontend frameworks to actually migrate my apps to these patterns.
Well, now it's easy.
"Hey Claude, look at this repo here, I want to move it to AWS lambdas + apigw + cloudfront. Break the frontend out into a SPA using vue3. I've copied some other apps and patterns {here} so go view those for how to do it"
And that's just the start.
I never thought I'd get into game development but it's opened that up to me as well (though, since I'm not an artist professionally I have issues getting generative AI to make assets, so I'm stuck plodding along in aseprite and photoshop make shit graphics lol). I've got one simple game like 80% done and ideas for the next one.
I never got too far down mobile development either. But one of the apps I made it could be super useful to have a mobile app. Describe the ux/ui/user flow, tell it where to find the api endpoints, and wham bam, android app developed.
Does it make perfect code one shot? Sometimes, but not often, I'll have to nudge it along. Does it make good architectural decisions? Not often on its own, again, I'l nudge it, or even better, I'll spin up another agent to do code reviews and feed the reviews back into the agent building out the app. Keep doing that loop until I feel like the code review agent is really reaching or being too nitpicky.
And holy shit, I've been able to work on multiple things at the same time this way. Like completely different domains, just have different agents running and doing work.