Designing Less Painful AI Production Lines
I overdid it on my AI-code production line. So often, designing things is overdoing them and then bringing them back down… once the suffering has been noticed. I wanted to solve the problem where: I ask AI to do a thing → …bleep bloop… AI says the thing is done. But it’s not done. And now I play AI whack-a-mole. In this case I wanted AI to write tests, then fulfill them with code—which sounds great. But it went wrong. What went really right were the first 2 steps: 1 - where Claude interviewed me to create a ‘job spec’ following a template we had designed together. 2 - where Claude reviewed the spec against a set of ‘checks’ we also templated. Amazing. What went wrong? All the test writing. It went nowhere and made the AI dev dumber. The tests were overkill and the Dev was designing to pass tests instead of being smart and looking at greater context. (There’s a parallel to our school systems here but I’ll leave you to parse it out.) So after that suffering, what did I do? I skipped the ...