I feel it’s important that this should be mentioned at least once in a thread like this: none. I choose to program the old-fashioned way, and do not anticipate this changing in the foreseeable future, and believe that I’ll cope just fine in my niche; and if it becomes commercially unviable, well, I may no longer be interested in the field anyway.

I won’t go into any details on why here, because that would make it too much about me. There have been plenty of discussions of reasons, trade-offs, &c. Plenty of people are rejecting this stuff, for a wide variety of reasons.

But one thing I will say: if I were teaching someone to program, I would actively discourage them entirely from using AI stuff, even though it will seem to help. (I mean someone that wants to learn programming, not someone that just wants results and is not interested in programming as such.)

Claude code + very opinionated type script. Try to push as much as possible as far left in the SDLF (types -> lint rules -> tests -> md) and try to improve the dev ex after every single PR.

I’m already doing this with my school (givedirection.com) and you’re gonna have a hard time nailing this down because there’s no two similar set ups

Especially along the range of newbie to expert it’s extremely variable and you’re not gonna be able to pick one that rules them all

I would suggest you revamp your approach and have different courses for different types of people I had to split my course into a basic and an advanced and they are extremely different

Even within the advanced course fairly simple stuff like hosting your own LLMs seems to really be a stretch for a lot of people

I'm a bit of a fanboy, but exe.dev + their Shelley web agent is pretty great

I wrote my own tooling around the raw LLMs:

I can tick files in Vim, those get concatenated into a prompt. Along with a feature request. Plus an instructions file that tells the LLM how to reply. Plus my general "rules for good code" file, plus one "rules for good code" file per language involved, plus a project specific overview file. The LLM then answers with a list of changes it wants to make to the code. My tooling then applies those changes and I look at them via "git diff". If I like it, I commit. If not, I change one of the prompts and start the process again.

Instead of replying with code changes, the LLM can also decide to request more files. I wrote a little DSL for that.

I described the beginnings of this workflow last July:

https://www.gibney.org/prompt_coding

Feels like an eternity ago. I think I will write a new blog post this July and describe how the workflow has evolved over the past year.

My stack is really boring, just VSCode + Ghostty and Claude Code team plan (premium seat).

Stanford University offered the course "CS146S: The Modern Software Developer" in Fall 2025. Check it out if interested. https://themodernsoftware.dev/

Something different that other folks might not have thought of: Robust multi-environment infra deploy scripts that leverage terraform + AWS SSO

I've found that converting stuff that's previously been very ops-cli heavy into very detailed skills has worked really really well.

I use Claude Opus 4.8 + Conductor as my daily driver

One is the sword (claude code) one is the shield (codex)

There's lots of ways. You have to upskill through the stages IMO. Write code, write w/ agent, write w/ multi agents, write w/orchestrators.

My way is to just run a giant AI agent factory engine and make the agents full flow do everything. (plan long term, write prd, task, review).

Here's ~4000 commits in last month as an example, i have about ~10k ish including private/work stuff? https://github.com/portpowered/you-agent-factory/commits/mai...

The premise when you get to full automation generally is you go full industral engineering:

1. watch overall flow, improve process via continuous improvement

2. work via checklists and gates.

3. replace process with mechanisms as much as possible (code > agents)

4. optimal throughput is continual testing and iteration (CI, CD), coverage, full e2e tests, mock everything, general best practices really.

decent blog: https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/

general points:

- build lots of linters

- document literally everything (arch, prd, best practices in repo)

- too many agents at the same time makes lots of code conflicts, so need to consider architecture of code how to maximize concurrency.

Currently using Arch Linux with VsCode and as server, I am currently going for vercel for no cost.

I am using Spec Driven Development approach implemented as a Claude Code plugin since Feb for all mid + size tasks. The idea is to write detailed specs first using agent help doing research and interviewing, decompose the task into smaller subtasks, write detailed spec for each task, implement each task separately. You can restart the session after every step in the workflow and after each subtask implementation since all requirements are materialized in specs. This helps to keep session context focused on a single task at time, improve adherence, reduce cost and allow to implement bigger tasks that are hard to implement with pure plan + code.

Discussion on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48231575

Repo: https://github.com/sermakarevich/sddw

Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SjKXF7hkoqyiN9-3tBGY...