USE BRANCHES

“And I save everything as dot MD file as markdown files. So I've got within my Community project, there are just there's a document folder, and then there's a list of markdown files. And I just every time I'm working with Commutely every time we're working with Claude, I'm saying, write it into a file. Log everything. Log everything. And I do that for two reasons. One is the context window. Claude, it's constantly forgetting what it's working on. And then I'm forgetting what I'm working on because I only do this on weekends.”

“There's something that we say that that I learned from a former manager and that we say a lot at LinkedIn, which is assume best intentions. And that is how that's, by the way, a big change from how newsrooms work, which is my last life, which was you assume worst intentions all the time. At at tech companies, you assume best intentions. I've now taken that to my family, and I've taken it also to building with AI. So I assume the AI has best intentions, but has to be reminded about how we work.”

“So my command that I start the day with or I end the day with usually is what did I drop the ball on? It's gonna go through Outlook. It's gonna go through Teams. It's gonna go through any updated files. It knows who I report to. It knows who reports to me. And it keeps track of things that I'm constantly clicking on during the day. So it'll find it'll go through all my emails and find places where I'm not responding or teams where I'm not responding. And what's great is it's not just places where I've been at mentioned. It's stuff that it knows that I am actually interested in.”

“Everything that Bob does has to be done in a in a branch. That's one lesson I've learned. I used to ship everything to Maine, and I learned the pain of that early on. But what I I didn't realize this I found this out from real engineers later is it's not when I merge the branch my other app I merge the branch in the main, and it didn't work. There were for some reason, it didn't, like, merge perfectly. It took me weeks to be able to figure out why it wasn't merging.”

“One is called the builder app. It's called Bob, Bob the builder. And he's got instructions to stop constantly, and you have to run everything by Ray, who's the review agent. Ray's job is senior software engineer who is obsessed with security, your reviews code of milestones, guard security architecture. And then the third agent is me. I am the person who breaks the tie that often happens between Bob wanting to do something and racing, you can't do it.”

“For a while, I thought I'm like a mediocre PM. And then I was like, no. Maybe I'm more like an architect. And now I realized, like, an architect actually knows real details. A PM is, like, super rigid and keeps the entire app in their head, and they're able to really prioritize well. I'm a bad prioritizer. All I am is a really picky customer. So I think that is, like, the role of the vibe coder is, what do I care about deeply? I'm, like, walking through this house, and I'm telling the architect, no. I want this room blue.”

“It's like being a manager of I've read this somewhere else. This is not my thing. But someone once said that managing AI is almost like managing a really smart but hungover intern. And I feel that way all the time. It's like, you're a genius, but you don't have it this morning. Just remember we've gone over this already.”

“I will say the hardest part of building my two apps has been the App Store. I had no idea. Navigating the App Store is a whole separate I've got I have so many chats where I'm like, what does Apple want from me here? And just getting Claude to teach me how to use the App Store has been a real I feel like that's almost the last friction left in being a builder is navigating the App Store.”