points by kragen 2 days ago | 0 comments
Can you sketch out a little bit of what your velocity looks like? What's a feature you implemented recently, and some bugs you fixed, and how much effort they took? Have you had an AI-driven project get bogged down with decreasing velocity, and what did that look like? Maybe that's what you mean by "struggling with some more complex features"?
It's probably true that keeping things simple is a little bit of a religious issue for me, but maybe my experience with humans writing software doesn't apply in the same way to AI coding. Maybe a lot of my religious beliefs are wrong!
[–] user43928 2 days ago
[–] kragen 2 days ago
Thanks, this is super informative! It sounds like maybe you weren't running multiple concurrent agents in the GPT-5.5 days, but now you are? Maybe you're on one of those US$200-a-month plans?
[–] user43928 2 days ago
Sure. No, I was also running 2-5 agents typically at that time.
When working on trickier things that require me to test on device and report results, this would drop to only a single session. I can't context switch between multiple threads while focusing on an investigation where I need to steer the agent.
Yes, I'm using the $200 plan for Claude, and only $20 for Codex, where I use 6.1 Sol to review every change implemented by Opus 5.5.
In the past I paid for both $200 subscriptions, but with Claude's current usage limits, that is no longer needed.
I find it hard to talk about any major feature without doxxing myself, since I'm particularly proud of the features that differentiate my app from competitors.
Trying to keep it generic, 3 MRs were for optimizing the app for the iPhone Duo. My app ships 7 AI models that run on-device.
Back then with GPT-5.5, I wouldn't say that the problem was decreasing velocity because of complexity adding up.
It was more like that the open problems were difficult. Matching animations to the gesture, manually handling scroll position in a browser during rotation. When you're already 10+ rounds into instrumenting and layering fixes on top of each other, it can get frustrating.
However, things worked out eventually. I suspect with today's Opus 5.5, many of these debugging rounds wouldn't have been necessary, since it can work for 2h+ on its own with the simulator, which GPT-5.5 at the time did not.
Yes, it's an interesting topic, and at work I've often felt accomplishment from simple, efficient solutions.
Even today Opus 5.5 suggested a plan that I'd call ridiculous. Instead of using a simple package manager feature, it proposed manually handling the issue and ensuring consistency via a new check in the CI. It was idiotic, really.
At the end of the day, it probably wouldn't have made a difference if I went with it, since the proposed ridiculous solution would also have worked. If my CI would ever be bogged down by 50 jobs, I could always start a conversation and probably resolve it in half a day.
And that's with today's Opus 5.5, while the capabilities are now improving every other month.
This ended up a pretty long comment, but I guess what I want to say is that in my experience AI is working well also in large projects, and that many of the fears around maintenance and technical debt have not manifested for me in practice.