how the friday workflow evolved

For me, building things with AI is like playing with a shiny new toy. I started spending tons of time writing huge prompts to describe my vision, creating a development plan from it, and then iterating through until it was finished. The results were… messy.

I’d end up with modules not connected to anything, routes that didn’t exist, and functionality that only moderately reflected what I had envisioned - which was its own special kind of frustrating. Trying to course correct in the middle of the build just turned the mess into complete chaos. Things would always start off smoothly, but then they’d start to drift and fall apart.

So rather than focus on the prompt, I started focusing on the workflow. I was using one agent, switching between development, testing, reviewing, etc - simply asking too much (like how some of us feel at work I would imagine).

Then I created my own personal team of agents, a specific role for each one of them (Planner, Architect, Designer, Developer, Reviewer, Tester), and I wrote down how they should work together, what good looked like, so on & so forth. I became the Founder & CEO of my very own AI Development Team.

Things worked better, in fact we were banging on all cylinders now. I had every agent in their own terminal; I was the orchestrator (more like glorified intern) informing each one when it was their turn to pick up the baton and run. Through much debugging, I was able to create a small app for my wedding. It was just a simple PWA where any photos or videos guests took with it were automatically uploaded to my Google Photos wedding album - that way we could capture the day from the perspective of our friends and family.

I started my next project, which was decidedly more ambitious - integrating my home assistant with a tiered LLM (local to frontier) stack I of course called JARVIS. This is where things started to get challenging, because with the agents’ roles, being terminal constrained and waiting on me to tell them when it was go time, progress was slow, and I am impatient.

So again, I took a break from working on projects and turned my attention back to the workflow. I’ve never even been a “read the instructions” kind of person, and now here I am painstakingly spending my time writing the instructions… Where did it all go wrong?