By Novae Caelum · Originally published
More AI superpowers!
I didn’t set out to be a software developer! Really truly didn’t. I used to code HTML and CSS in the late 90s/early 2000s. I was mostly in over my head, stealing code wholesale from various places around the internet, making rodents dance with rainbow balls swirling around, putting pirated Veggie Tales mp3s on my personal site. All that good stuff.
I never thought I’d be knee deep in planning out how to best manage a React app tech stack, how to make Cloudflare turnstiles, how to wire in a payment processor, how to package a desktop app, how to sign it.
I still catching up on all the nuances, but I know how to ask questions, I know how to challenge those questions, and I know how to never, eeeever take one AI’s word for granted. Ever. Ha.
Last week, I ran out of Fable and shrugged and let Opus 5 hammer at some of my pre-launch coding todo list.
WHOOF and it took Sol a few days to fix Opus’s egregious and confident mistakes.
I watched Fable thrash around trying to debug an authentication loop for granting access to users, meanwhile Astra (oh my god did this dude come on the scene at the right time!!) was chugging away at a big list of fixes.
I got overconfident and put Astra on ripping through all my prompts in my show making app to tighten them down, find the gaps, all of it. And he did, except no, we are not in fact going to tear apart core processes we spent months testing in the days before public beta release.
A few days ago, Fable did get me this, overhauling my costume system so that now we actually actually get costumes that match to the right scenes.
I promise you don’t get how hard this was.
And then Astra got me 50% more continuity in the location sheets we generate, making the doors and stairs and windows (mostly) match up across the shots on the sheet, whereas it was an assorted jumble before that somewhat made sense. (booyah!)