janee

yes, this is the proper use case.

We hooked up fly.io's sprites mcp to our company claude and now all employees can spin up dev envs and actually prototype, verify or reproduce something before coming to engineering; doing it directly from web or wherever and it's properly authed and sandboxed through their accounts

thanks! I've been having quite a lot of success with your instruction today. Tried so many variants, best practises bla bla bla, but yeah this one seems be working quite nicely for me so far :)

haha no it's an old (15years old) abandoned enterprise app running on-prem that hasn't seen updates in more than a decade.

Yes but you need to setup quite a bit of tooling to provide feedback loops.

It's one thing to get an llm to do something unattended for long durations, it's a other to give it the means of verification.

For example I'm busy upgrading a 500k LoC rails 1 codebase to rails 8 and built several DSLs that give it proper authorised sessions in a headless browser with basic html parsing tooling so it can "see" what affect it's fixes have. Then you somehow need to also give it a reliable way to keep track of the past and it's own learnings, which sound simple but I have yet to see any tool or model solve it on this scale...will give sonnet 4.5 a try this weekend, but yeah none of the models I tried are able to produce meaningful results over long periods on this upgrade task without good tooling and strong feedback loops

Btw I have upgraded the app and taking it to alpha testing now so it is possible

it's fairly bespoke, but some examples:

ETL pipelines, we catalogue and link our custom transformers to bodies of text that describes business cases for it with some examples, you can then describe your ETL problem in text and it will scaffold out a pipeline for you.

Fullstack scaffolds that go from models to UI screen, we have like a set of standard components and how they interact and communicate through GraphQL to our monolith (e.g. server side pagination, miller column grouping, sorting, filtering, PDF export, etc. etc.). So if you make a new model it will scaffold the CRUD fully for you all the way to the UI (it get's some stuff wrong but it's still a massive time save for us).

Patterns for various admin controls (we use active admin, so this thing will scaffold AA resources how we want).

Refactor recipes for certain things we've deprecated or improved. We generally don't migrate everything at once to a new pattern, instead we make "recipes" that describe the new pattern and point it to an example, then run it as we get to that module or lib for new work.

There are more, but these are some off the top of my head.

I think a really big aspect of this though is the integration of our scaffolds and recipes in Cursor. We keep these scaffold documents in markdown files that are loaded as cursor notepads which reference to real source code.

So we sort of rely heavily on the source code describing itself, the recipe or pattern or scaffold just provides a bit of extra context on different usage patterns and links the different pieces or example together.

You can think of it as giving an LLM "pro tips" around how things are done in each team and repo which allows for rapid scaffold creation. A lof of this you can do with code generators and good documentation, but we've found this usage of Cursor notepads for scaffolds and architecture is less labour intensive way to keep it up to date and to evolve a big code base in a consistent manner.

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Edit: something to add, this isn't a crutch, we require our devs to fully understand these patterns. We use it as a tool for consistency, for rapid scaffold creation and of course for speeding up things we haven't gotten around to streamlining (like repetitive bloat)

So we have an LLM code scaffold repo we use in a large (2m loc) production Rails codebase and it works amazingly well.

Rails and especially Ruby lends itself to describing business logic as part of source code closer to natural language than a lot of typed languages imo and that synergizes really well with a lot of different models and neat LLM uses for code creation and maintenance.

I go in because it helps separate work life from home life, which I find benefits both positively in different ways.

I prefer a hybrid work area with three zones

1. Open plan chaos, lots of people talking and going bonkers

2. Smaller office 3~4 people, maybe your team or people you like more than others

3. Solo office, or hot desk in quiet zone. For deep focus. This one has a great view of the mountains in the area, which I find helps me think.

I bounce around these at my office depending on mood and task at hand. That variety is the main thing I like about our office setup

"macro service" hilarious, will most certainly use this in some future conversation at work, thanks.

There is the downside of having to maintain both schemas now.

Unless you automate it devs will have to remember to migrate both when making a change which adds some overhead, not a lot, but it's just something to consider here imo as some migrations (schema and/or data) can become nasty and complex

"what advice would you give to xxx"

Other than a means to gain advice, I've found this question a good gauge for collaboration compatibility.

I often ask it in interviews on both sides to give me insight into what someone currently values.

It's sort of like asking someone to define "better" be that in skill, or happiness or avoidance of pain.

My main interpretation of the post would be a high value placed on pragmatism, gained via a journey of experimentation. Put crudely there is no silver bullet but try a few for a while

I think point 10 is highly underrated in my opinion

Have you thought about taking on the role of CTO?

Not sure if it's a possibility or something you even want, but it sounds like you're invested and have thoughts around the role.

Maybe if it comes to quitting..before you do that have a conversation with the CEO about taking on the role?