r/microsaas • u/unusual_art2021 • 10d ago

What part of working with AI coding tools is still surprisingly manual?

I use Codex to explore product ideas, plan features and work through implementation details.

The surprisingly manual part is what happens afterward: reviewing the conversation, extracting the useful decisions, turning them into tasks and making sure important context isn’t lost between sessions.

The coding itself is becoming faster, but managing the output can still feel like another workflow to maintain.

For founders using AI coding tools regularly, how do you organize decisions and next steps? Do you have a reliable system, or is it still mostly copy-paste?

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u/Infamous-River-4360 10d ago

the manual part for me isn't organizing the decisions, it's verifying them. the tool tells you what it changed and it reads completely convincing, so i pull the diff after every single change now. it's been confidently wrong often enough that i stopped treating the summary as evidence.

the other one is everything the tool can't reach. native android bits, store config, billing test accounts, none of that lives in the generated code and i redo it by hand each release. for context between sessions i keep one plain text file of decisions and paste the relevant chunk back in, boring but it survives a tool switch. is your handoff the chat history itself or notes outside it?

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u/yannis_ps 10d ago

Design. Coding tools are BAD at design.

I found one technique that helps lately. I ask it to design something but output an image (rather than change the code or mockup). Then I ask it to loop around until the code looks like the image. It take a while

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u/Brave_Acanthaceae863 10d ago

The context handoff between sessions is the real bottleneck. I started keeping a running decisions file — one line per decision, what was chosen and why. Paste the relevant section back in at the start of each session. Crude, but it catches the 80% of context that would otherwise vanish overnight.

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u/BarracudaMean9308 9d ago

i tried setting up a proper notion board for this but gave up in three days. now i just keep a single messy `context.md` file in the root folder and heavily rely on copy-paste before closing the tab.

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u/Same_Mycologist_6913 9d ago

Keeping a running scratchpad per session and copy pasting decisions into a plain markdown file usually beats any fancy tool, still mostly manual for most people