I previously let an AI agent build an entire social media site in one day. It worked, but then it introduced a bug that neither I nor the agent could fix because I had no idea what the code did.
Now I want to rebuild it. I want to use AI again, but this time as an assistant – I’ll review every change, write tests together, and keep a clear plan.
Which AI tool would you recommend for this hybrid approach? How do you structure prompts to force the agent to explain before coding?
Also, do you think a couple of weeks is realistic to rebuild the site that has feature parity with Lemmy and a few extra features that the AI managed to build in a single day? Should I switch to a more manual approach with the agent only for boilerplate?
Any advice is appreciated. Thanks!
Let’s overlook the en-dash here and assume good faith. You should review every change from the start. You cannot assume the AI will work correctly or even has a concept of correct vs incorrect (or, despite the marketing, the ability to actually reason, sans a definition of the word that explicitly includes language models).
Any tool should work. Just ask it questions, and forbid it from modifying or generating code itself.
Note that all LLMs are prone to hallucinate. While I haven’t tried Fable yet, even Opus with maximum reasoning can produce utter bullshit if something isn’t in its training data. This means you need to validate everything it says.
Use the model as a tool to point you in the right direction and help you form good questions or digest things beyond where you currently are. Verify the answers. Read documentation yourself. Go to the source, and learn from there. The LLMs are not omniscient, nor are they going to tell you when they cannot answer a question, so don’t rely too heavily on them.
Let me ask you this: are you familiar with ActivityPub? ActivityStreams? JSON-LD? Do you know how to compact a JSON-LD document using a Lemmy-compatible context? Do you know how to dereference IRIs pointing to other servers?
Going even higher level, do you know what backend framework you want to use? Frontend framework, if any? Do you know how to use them? How will you store user-generated content, including text, images, and other kinds of media? How will you handle access controls for those users? How will you perform authentication and user sign-ups?
If you don’t know, can you even fill the gaps in your knowledge in under two weeks?
Two weeks is enough time to build a very basic proof of concept backend. It’s enough time to mock out a couple pages on the frontend. You can’t build a service in two weeks if you expect to actually understand how it works. You won’t learn anything asking a LLM to do it for you.
Learning takes time. If you skip that step, you will plateau at whatever level the LLM is at. Only by taking the time to learn will you ever actually grow as a developer.