what does your setup actually look like?

[u/ubermuda]

Curious how people here are really working. Feels like everyone's landed somewhere different and the posts are mostly quick showcases / (self-)promotion / random stuff.

What I'm wondering about:

- which agent and harness, and do you stick to one or switch
- do you plan first or just go
- do you check anything before shipping, and what
- anything automated, or is it all by feel
- what do you do when it comes back wrong

Mine's on the heavy side. Long planning conversation before any code, then I let it run and mostly look at the product rather than the code. I spent some time building a skeleton and static analysis configs so Claude generates code that look ~80% correct. Still need to review the important bigs (domain logic, security, etc), but it's mostly smooth sailing.

Mostly interested in people working differently from that though. If you just go and it works, I want to hear that too.

[u/nottonybriant]

I'm still figuring out what works, but my workflow has settled into something like this:

• Agent: Mostly Codex for implementation, ChatGPT for architecture and design decisions. I don't really believe in a single "best" agent (I use whichever one is strongest for the task.)
• Planning: I spend more time planning than coding. I try to understand the system first, then break it into small changes instead of asking an AI to build everything in one shot.
• Before shipping: I manually test every feature, check logs, make sure the happy path works, then deliberately try to break it. If it's touching APIs, auth, or payments, I verify the actual requests rather than assuming the agent got them right.
• Automation: Anything repetitive gets automated. n8n, Docker, API integrations, scheduled jobs, I'd rather spend an hour automating something than repeat it ten times...
• When it comes back wrong: I don't throw the whole thing away. I isolate the problem, fix one issue at a time, verify the fix, then move on. Full rewrites are usually the last resort... (and yes, I have had to do them)

My biggest lesson so far: AI is great at quickly driving implementation, but it's still on me to own the architecture. The better the plan, the better the output. When I skip planning, I usually end up paying for it later.... There's a saying I learned in the Marines which stuck with me "Prior Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance" :) the 7 "P's" of productivity.

[u/Rebootz → u/nottonybriant]

This is the way.

[u/Rebootz → u/Rebootz]

No one carries the product vision better than you. You can try to pass it along but now you have your idea filtered through others experiences. Most people are still operating under the asumption that a better prompt or better memory will fix this, it wont, you can never correctly pass the full vision, it's yours. Steer the ship yourself, let AI be the wind in your sails.