Michael Hartl on deliberately primitive LLM coding: no subagents, just conversation
mhartl · x · 2026-11-09
Rails Tutorial author Michael Hartl asked another developer for workflow details, surfacing a deliberately minimalist philosophy: no subagents, no accumulating skills, no unattended "software factory" — just conversing with a "robot friend" to analyze and generate code. He sees no convincing evidence complex agent orchestration beats this. Supporting details: codex may read/write files but is forbidden from git commits; setup is one window each for Emacs, codex, and a test shell.
Related event: Developers Embrace Minimalist Chat-Only AI Coding Workflows(3 posts)→
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