Steve Troughton-SmithI really don't know what development on my own apps looks like, going forward. It's like going back to being Clark Kent when you're moonlighting as Superman. I can't imagine working on my existing apps like I have been with my Codex-built projects, and I'm not sure how to bridge the two ways of working. It's beginning to become difficult to imagine writing code by hand again, and it's only been a month 😐
I think part of the problem is being able to use LLMs with confidence in a greenfield codebase, vs being afraid to break anything in an established app. I am far less likely to ask it to do big things in my apps, and I'm far more likely to back out any changes it does make for fear of the repercussions. There are architectural decisions in my apps that I never would have made had I access to something like Codex at the time, and now I've made them they're too fragile and require too much to fix
Chris Clarke@stroughtonsmith I'm really curious how you envision approachiing the maintenance phase of an app developed like this. I can see how one would approach new features, but what about bugs? Do you trust the LLM to "fix" code without changing something else, do you need to break into the code yourself?
@checlarke I think people overthink this; if you, as a product manager, had to fix bugs in your team's software project, would you get stuck in yourself, or would you delegate? That answer will vary person to person, but I think it's informative here.
Most likely, you'll delegate and trust your team — you assign a model to fix it, and if that model doesn't work, you might try another, and if that doesn't work you might try education or changing processes to make issues like this less common
@stroughtonsmith thanks - I need to think about this. The thing is the capabilities of these models are changing so fast that my own mental model is having trouble keeping up.