KILL TOIL

“I don't think we're there in general with, these kind of code tools in terms of the precision editing that you wanna do. And trust me, I I use the whole kind of landscape of tools to really see kind of where these workflows are going, and I think still the the gold standard for me is just being able to drag stuff around. And you can do a lot with a click that would take you a 100 words to kind of write and to, like, really precisely nail. Like, no one wants to prompt for the exact hex code or the the shade of yellow.”

“I spend quite a lot of my time just sitting here inside of my terminal now. I do so much less. I think of the, like, what I used to have to do where I had to have a browser window open at the same time as having my code window open. So, I often have two, three, up to five maybe cloud code, instances running all at the same time, working on different aspects of the work that I'm I'm tracking.”

“Something that happens a lot is, the sources of truth diverge between design and code. So sometimes some things only really exist in a state in code, or you start working with a developer and you really, like, elevate what the thing was, the artifact that you originally supplied. Or sometimes, like, that just doesn't exist in code. You've inherited someone else's project from forever forever ago.”

“We have an internal service, for example, that I didn't know the origin of its name. And so I asked Claude to go and figure out based on the commit history, what the origin was, and it came back with a really good story, about, like, how that came to be. It got renamed multiple times that, you know, contributor has since left the company many years ago, so this was kind of lost in the ether. But now, now, all of this lore, honestly, from the company is actually, like, embedded inside of the code base, and, I can I can find it now?”

“I have this slash ship skill that I wrote. I use it all the time, in my workflow. Often in order to get something into a large repo like the Figma repo, there's a lot of work that's involved in just making sure tests pass, making sure, all of the, like, preflight things are in order. And also then once it's pushed to, the repository, checking on CI and making sure that it correctly built and is all green so that I can actually merge it. Previously, I would have to kind of babysit these, you know, kind of processes, like, all the way at every single step.”

“Oftentimes, the code base gets way ahead of where the actual design file is, and there's states or workflows that just don't exist at all within the design file. So what I can do is say, send all five states. Sign up flow to click on. Now the agent's going to do is read my code base, understand what I'm referring to when I say those five states. And for each one of those, it's going to individually import that one by one into Figma such that the Figma document will then have all of those states laid out all side by side so that my design partner can work against against it.”

“It's definitely changed, our workflows, in a way that it's kinda really blown up what a workflow even is. Before, you know, for the the majority of our careers, we've had a very, like, linear agreed upon workflow where the where you increase fidelity as you go on. Right? Because it's really expensive to work in code, and it's really cheap just to trade ideas and sketch them out. But I basically collapsed that, and it's just as cheap to riff in code as it is to riff in design.”

“What's really interesting about, like, our our role with all of this is kind of really moved upstream. And we're in this really I find, almost decadent moment in time where before we had to be so conditioned on really sharp product decision making skill that would have happened, like, almost immediately. So now we're kind of actually at this point where more of the priorities can make it above the cut line. And, also, we can spend a lot more time in the planning stage. And so we do that, and then on the other side, we spend a lot more time in the craft because we can, because we can reach higher for ideas.”

“Every engineering org that I've ever run has an internal Wiki that has that page, which is this is what you do before you push a PR and you get in everybody's way in the deploy pipeline. And every engineering team should go through their onboarding Wiki and pull every page out, every this is what you should do into a skill, and then give give access to that to their entire team. And so I think we're really shifted from this idea of, like, an SOP into a skill or a doc into a skill.”

“That can work, but I find that the more successful one is, is it's either cursing a little bit, in the prompt. I I, you know, am somewhat ashamed to admit that it that's extremely effective. But the more, common one I I use now is that my boss is mad at me, and it seems to work pretty well. It it kind of sympathizes with you, and it's it's it's kinda cute.”