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cloud8421today at 7:12 PM1 replyview on HN

At $WORK, my team is relatively small (< 10 people) and a few people really invested in getting the codebase (a large Elixir application with > 3000 modules) in shape for AI-assisted development with a very comprehensive set of skills, and some additional tooling.

It works really well (using Claude Code and Opus 4.6 primarily). Incremental changes tend to be well done and mostly one-shotted provided I use plan mode first, and larger changes are achievable by careful planning with split phases.

We have skills that map to different team roles, and 5 different skills used for code review. This usually gets you 90% there before opening a PR.

Adopting the tool made me more ambitious, in the sense that it lets me try approaches I would normally discard because of gaps in my knowledge and expertise. This doesn't mean blindly offloading work, but rather isolating parts where I can confidently assess risk, and then proceed with radically different implementations guided by metrics. For example, we needed to have a way to extract redlines from PDF documents, and in a couple of days went from a prototype with embedded Python to an embedded Rust version with a robust test oracle against hundreds of document.

I don't have multiple agents running at the same time working on different worktrees, as I find that distracting. When the agent is implementing I usually still think about the problem at hand and consider other angles that end up in subsequent revisions.

Other things I've tried which work well: share an Obsidian note with the agent, and collaboratively iterate on it while working on a bug investigation.

I still write a percentage of code by hand when I need to clearly visualise the implementation in my head (e.g. if I'm working on some algo improvement), or if the agent loses its way halfway through because they're just spitballing ideas without much grounding (rare occurrence).

I find Elixir very well suited for AI-assisted development because it's a relatively small language with strong idioms.


Replies

ramraj07today at 8:28 PM

This exactly matches our findings: if we start molding the repo to be "AI native" whatever that means, add the right tooling and still demand all engineers take full responsibility for their output, this system is a true multiplier.

I also have Copilot and Cursor bugbot reviews and run it on a Ralph wiggum loop with claude code. A few rounds overnight and the PR is perfect and ready for a final review before merging.

I do run 4 CC sessions in parallel though, but thats just one day a week. The rest of the week is spent figuring out the next set of features and fixes needed, operational things, meetings,feedback, etc.