I was asked to write user stories about a complex topic where I’m the SME at work. I spent two hours info dumping everything I knew about the project, everything the AI wouldn’t have any context for, using Cursor to add related projects to the workspace, tagging specific files where we’d implemented similar things with our styles, noted all the quirks of the system and how it works and where to find relevant information. I spent a lot of time on it, and then asked it to reach out using cli to grab relevant information from our infra, and write stories about how we’d accomplish everything I intend to get done. I then spent another few hours reviewing the 45 or so stories that conversation generated. It was similar to how I’d talk to a new contractor I’m onboarding to work on the work.

I have a deep knowledge of the information, have done the process we’re doing on two previous projects, but organizing all the stories would have been an absolute nightmare. I still spent half a day on this, I’d guess the fatigue from the boring parts would have made this take a week or maybe two, just because I was doing the parts I enjoy (knowing things and describing them) and I was able to offload the parts I’m not great at (using a lot of boilerplate language to organize the info I knew into scrum stories). Then I had a meeting, reviewed the stories with my coworkers, we had a discussion, deleted two or three of them that we determined weren’t necessary, and fixed up one or two where I’d provided insufficient information about some context surrounding coloring of a page.

It burned through a ton of Opus 4.6 tokens, looked through a ton of code (mostly that I’d written, pre-LLM), but has been amazing for helping me move into a lead position where grooming stories and being organized has always been my weakest point.

Also, when I wrote a postmortem for a deploy that had some issues, I wrote it all by hand. You have to know when the tools help and when they will hinder.