[HN Gopher] Building a Personal AI Factory
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Building a Personal AI Factory
Author : derek
Score : 31 points
Date : 2025-07-01 21:14 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.john-rush.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.john-rush.com)
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Okay, what is he actually building with this?
|
| I have a problem where half the times I see people talking about
| their AI workflow, I can't tell if they are talking about some
| kind of dream workflow that they have, or something they're
| actually using productively
| ClawsOnPaws wrote:
| I keep coming to the same conclusion, which basically is: if I
| had an LLM write it for me, I just don't care about it. There
| are 2 projects out of the maybe 50 or so that are LLM
| generated, and even for those two I cared enough to make
| changes myself without an LLM. The rest just sit there because
| one day I thought huh wouldn't it be neat if, and then realized
| actually I cared more about having that thought than having the
| result of that thought. Then you end up fighting with different
| models and implementation details and then it messes up
| something and you go back and forth about how you actually want
| it to work, and somehow this is so much more draining and
| exhausting than just getting the work done manually with some
| slight completion help perhaps, maybe a little bit of
| boilerplate fill-in. And yes, this is after writing extensive
| design docs, then having some reasoning LLM figure out the
| tasks that need to be completed, then having some models talk
| back and forth about what needs to happen and while it's
| happening, and then I spent a whole lot of money on what
| exactly? Questionably working software that kinda sorta does
| what I wanted it to do? If I have a clear idea, or an existing
| codebase, if I end up guiding it along, agents and stuff are
| pretty cool I guess. But vibe coding? Maybe I'm in the minority
| here but as soon as it's a non trivial app, not just a random
| small script or bespoke app kind of deal, it's not fun, I often
| don't get the results I actually wanted out of it even if I
| tried to be as specific as I wanted with my prompting and
| design docs and example data and all that, it's expensive, code
| is still messy as heck, and at the end I feel like I just spent
| a whole lot of time actually literally arguing with my
| computer. Why would I want to do that?
| jwpapi wrote:
| I've written a full stack monorepo with over 1,000 files
| alone now. I've started with AI doing a lot of the work, but
| the percentage goes down and down. For me a good codebase is
| not about how much you've written, but about how it's
| architectured. I want to have an app that has the best
| possible user and dev experience meaning its easy to maintain
| and easy to extend. This is achieved by making code easy to
| understand, for yourself, for others.
|
| In my case it's more like developing a mindset building a
| framework than to push feature after feature. I would think
| it's like that for most companies. You can get an unpolished
| version of most apps easily, but polishing takes 3-5x the
| time.
|
| Lets not talk about development robustness, backend security
| etc etc. Like AI has just way too many slippages for me in
| these cases.
|
| However I would still consider myself a heavy AI user, but I
| mainly use it to discuss plans,(what google used to be) or to
| check it if I've forgotten anything.
|
| For most features in my app I'm faster typing it out exactly
| the way I want it. (with a bit of auto-complete) The whole
| brain-coordination works better.
|
| I guess long talk, but you're not alone trust your instinct.
| You don't seem narrow minded.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I'd love to see more specifics here, that is, how Claude and o3
| talk to each other, an example session, etc.
| breckenedge wrote:
| I presume via Goose via MCP in Claude Code:
|
| > I also have a local mcp which runs Goose and o3.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Ah, I skimmed the docs for Goose but I couldn't figure out
| exactly what it is that it _does_ , which is a common issue
| for docs.
|
| For example:
| https://block.github.io/goose/docs/category/tutorials/ I just
| want to see an example workflow before I set this up in CI or
| build a custom extension to it!
| breckenedge wrote:
| Classic Steve Klabnik comment.
| web3aj wrote:
| +1
| schmookeeg wrote:
| I use Zen MCP and OpenRouter. Every once in awhile, my instance
| of claude code will "phone a friend" and use Gemini for a code
| review. Often unprompted, sometimes me asking for "analysis" or
| "ultrathink" about a thorny feature when I doubt the proposed
| implementation will work out or cause footguns.
|
| It's wild to see in action when it's unprompted.
|
| For planning, I usually do a trip out to Gemini to check our
| work, offer ideas, research, and ratings of completeness. The
| iterations seem to be helpful, at least to me.
|
| Everyone in these sorta threads asks for "proofs" and I don't
| really know what to offer. It's like 4 cents for a second
| opinion on what claude's planning has cooked up, and the
| detailed response has been interesting.
|
| I loaded 10 bucks onto OpenRouter last month and I think I've
| pulled it down by like 50 cents. Meanwhile I'm on Claude Max @
| $200/mo and GPT Plus for another $20. The OpenRouter stuff
| seems like less than couch change.
|
| $0.02 :D
| skybrian wrote:
| > It's essentially free to fire off a dozen attempts at a task -
| so I do.
|
| What sort of subscription plan is that?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Claude Code's $200 Max subscription can take a lot of usage. I
| haven't done a dozen things at once, but I have worked on two
| side projects simultaneously with it before.
|
| ccusage shows me getting over 10x the value of paying via API
| tokens this month so far...
| photon_garden wrote:
| It's hard to evaluate setups like this without knowing how the
| resulting code is being used.
|
| Standalone vibe coded apps for personal use? Pretty easy to
| believe.
|
| Writing high quality code in a complex production system? Much
| harder to believe.
| solomonb wrote:
| > When something goes wrong, I don't hand-patch the generated
| code. I don't argue with claude. Instead, I adjust the plan, the
| prompts, or the agent mix so the next run is correct by
| construction.
|
| I don't think "correct by construction" means what OP thinks it
| means.
| btbuildem wrote:
| Also, aren't they just rolling the dice here? Can you turn down
| the temperature via Claude Code?
| vFunct wrote:
| The issue I'm facing with multiple agents working on separate
| work trees is that each independent agent tends to have
| completely different ideas on things that aren't in the
| instructions. For example, an agent working on the dashboard for
| the Documents portion of my project has a completely different
| idea from the agent working on the dashboard for the Design
| portion of my project. The design consistency is not there, not
| just visually, but architecturally. Database schema ideas are
| inconsistent, for example.
|
| You start to update instruction files to get things consistent,
| but then these end up being thousands of lines on a large project
| just to get the foundations right, eating into the context
| window.
|
| I think ultimately we might need smaller language models trained
| on certain rules & schemas only, instead of on the universe of
| ideas that a prompt could result in.
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