Peter steers coding agents through conversation, not plan mode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 29:16

   i found that asking it to like just ask a bunch of clarifying questions to then make you clarify stuff helps a lot yeah it's it's also funny because i'm more i like codex more than cloud code i think it's it's the better model even though it's it's it's it's incredibly slow but it's thorough and things work and people complain that there's no plan mode right yeah And my joke is always plan mode was a hack that Entropic had to add because the model is so trigger-friendly and would just run off and build code.

2. 29:52

   In the latest models, especially like GBD 5.2, I'm just having a conversation. I'm like, hey, I want to build this and this feature. It should do this and this and this. And maybe dragging this control tool like I like this design or this and this. Give me options. Just say, let's discuss. Give me options. and then they have a conversation with it. And then the model would propose something and they're like, I mean, I usually don't type, I talk to it.

3. 30:14

   Yeah. It's staying on brand. Do you do anything to manage the context? Once you have a conversation with it, it can get really long and it can get confused. Do you try to, like, do you make it manually compact or summarize stuff? I feel that this is also like old patterns. This was very much a problem with cloud code. Still is to a point. codex is so much more the context lasts so much longer even though like on paper it's maybe like 30 percent more but it feels more like two or three eggs more i think i think a lot of it has to do with like the the internal thinking the internal thinking of of gpt models is really effing weird but yeah like the for context management i think this was much more problem in the earlier models now most of my features fit into one window so the whole discussion and

4. 31:04

   building happens simultaneously okay got it and that that works fine like sometimes if if it's a really long thing i create a new one you're going to like codify it in a file but this is much less of a problem than it than it was before that's again like the space evolves so fast you just have to try things yeah got it okay got it so basically so just to summarize like basically when you add a new feature to cloud or whatever you're building like maybe just walk through the steps like first you explore explore the problem and the solutions with the ai and then you do you actually make a plan at all or just go it's even better like i you know i i built this project and yeah which is kind of like a mix between jarvis and her okay okay the movie yeah yeah yeah um but it's very difficult to convey how it makes you feel and how useful it is just by talking about

5. 31:54

   it is yeah so on on twitter it got me very muted traction like i don't Everyone I show it in person gets super excited because they see me interact with it and showing off all the cool things. But you can't get across the same thing on a picture when I talk about it. So eventually, I created a Discord and I just hooked up my bot to Discord so that people could interact with my AI that has full access to everything on my system, with my private memory, on a copy of Discord.

6. 32:26

   Like the most nuts thing that I ever did, I think. and then people got hooked and now and now like people always ask me there oh can you build this feature or there isn't this bug and most of the time i now approach it by making a literal screenshot of the conversation dragging it into the the terminal or just copying the text depending on how it is and just ask hey let's discuss this because i'm lazy i don't even have to type anymore i just like copy in discord conversations um or the same also when people ask hey do you support this and this or how do i do this and this i'm just like can you read the code and write a new FAQ entry. And it does that. So these days, it's actually how I start building features most of the time. But reading on Discord and seeing where people have pain points.

7. 33:11

   Oh, my God. So you just paste the conversation and you just talk to AI about it and you figure out what the right solution is. Partly that. Partly also, I have a scraper. So at least once a day, I scrape the help section and ask the model, what are the biggest pain points? And then we fix them. and and do you do all the fancy shit like do you have like multiple agents and like you know you have those crazy skills and stuff that you run or not you just go i have very i mean i most of my skills are actually personal life skills like food tracking or buying groceries or like that kind of stuff for coding very little because you you don't need that much i don't use mzps or any of that crap um i don't i don't believe in in this big orchestration systems because like we talked before i i feel if i'm in the loop i can build a product that feels better maybe there's

8. 34:06

   maybe there's ways to like build it faster but i'm already so fast i'm mostly limited by thinking about it and sometimes a little bit by waiting for codex but mostly it's it's my I'm thinking that's a limiting factor. I just use a bunch of terminals, like split screen. I don't use work trees, because again, I feel it's just like unneeded complexity. I just have a few checkouts of the repository, like cloud port 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

9. 34:35

   And then either they are free or they're working on something. Either I'm exploring something, or I'm building something, or I'm fixing something. And then when it's done, I test it locally, and then i just and then i push it to main and then i sync it up so this is it feels a little bit it also feels a bit like a factory if they're all busy but if you only work on one it's very hard to actually get into the zone because it's just too slow and you have to wait yeah you can only shit post on twitter so much uh so i feel i need multiple ones to to really keep me hooked and get into the same flow state that i had when coding just that i i'm like insanely more productive dude i don't know if you play like real-time strategy games before but like it's kind of like