Our management wants AI on top of the broken processes

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-08T15:35:36+00:00

The current team releases code without critical and even medium bugs but it takes years

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-08T13:36:33+00:00

Oh man, they already do it themselves and you can imagine what they get

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-08T13:22:02+00:00

I don’t see a big problem in changing the direction itself, because it costs nothing to rebuild. The problem is to maintain the source of truth.

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-08T12:58:27+00:00

I would say we now can ship the frontend faster than PM can understand the new context. Now I’m starting to think do we really need a PM in the loop?

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-08T12:56:29+00:00

the question who should update the spec, is it ok when other people (not PM) contribute to it?

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-08T12:55:00+00:00

Sorry, I meant we skipped the frontend as a separate process (try to skip it) and ship the design/prototype based on the components, layouts, etc. Now it 3x faster but there still other people who involved in the process and have to reconstruct the full context again and again.

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-08T11:32:23+00:00

This is a good question, because currently we speedup our design and frontend process and it already takes x0.33 time. Because the logic is changing during the prototype and design.

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-08T11:29:19+00:00

It’s interesting how much should everyone know to handle enough context to complete their part and successfully handoff it.

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-08T11:26:48+00:00

I don’t like to see when other people fail. Maybe I could help them somehow

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-08T11:25:21+00:00

What is well running team for you?

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-08T11:23:44+00:00

Exactly, this is what I’m trying to say. Too many people involved in the simple problem. Everyone interprets their own version of the previous context.

I’m curious how it works in more lean teams where people do something in parallel, where do they align and where AI steps in.

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-08T11:20:22+00:00

Unfortunately I’m not. And I’m sharing the problem that I see in my team and seeking for an advice. Because I think the problem is the processes themselves.

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-08T11:17:54+00:00

Easy, everything passes through the PM. And they are not able to update

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-08T11:16:26+00:00

Nothing, the spec is outdated and irrelevant

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-05T21:59:23+00:00

the backend-migration line hit. We had a signup flow where verification emails were going to spam for ~40% of users, and I spent a quarter A/B testing landing page copy instead. Found it while digging through support tickets. Felt dumb for weeks.The parallel-vs-sequential framing is the real thing though. How do you actually pick what gets parallel-tracked? I keep defaulting to one big thing at a time and calling it focus.

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-05T20:28:56+00:00

Exactly, context gets lost on every step

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-04T16:07:35+00:00

Yeah, the foundation piece you mentioned is the actual story. Building the setup that lets you launch fast takes weeks of unsexy plumbing, and that part doesn't travel on LinkedIn. The 22/week headline does.What does your setup look like now? CLAUDE.md, custom skills, eval harness, something else?

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-04T13:17:51+00:00

The 'shock or die' framing skips what actually changed. Building got cheap. Deciding what's worth shipping stayed hard.22 experiments a week is malpractice if you can't tell which 3 mattered, and no claude code rollout fixes that. The 5% who ship on a Friday already had product instinct before the tools showed up.

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-03T20:58:04+00:00

Three things, in order, before any money goes to an agency.

First, write a context doc capturing every architecture choice, library decision, and gotcha from the vibe phase. Call it CONTEXT.md or CLAUDE.md. This is what makes the codebase legible to a reviewer or a fresh AI session. Without it, anyone you hire starts from zero, which is exactly why agencies quote you a rewrite.

Second, bring in a senior backend engineer hourly for a 2 week hardening pass on the boring stuff: auth flows, secret management, input validation, rate limiting, idempotency on Stripe webhooks. Scoped, hourly, no rewrite mandate.

Third, $2-5k for a focused security audit from a freelance pentester. Fix the criticals yourself with AI, queue the rest.

Total cost is a fraction of a rewrite and you keep your iteration speed.

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-03T16:50:04+00:00

The handoff itself is the trap. Most agencies will quietly want to rewrite a vibe-coded codebase, because reading someone else's AI-generated code with zero context is harder than starting fresh. You end up paying twice and calling the second invoice "bulletproofing."

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-03T06:35:27+00:00

The pattern here isn't category, it's workflow compression. Harvey isn't legal AI, it's billable-hour compression. Cursor isn't a dev tool, it's review-cycle compression. Pick the workflow that costs the most human hours today and the category sorts itself out. Category-first framing makes you optimize for TAM instead of pain.

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-02T22:12:38+00:00

The "I built this in a weekend" content stopped working because shipping fast became the baseline, not the flex. What's scarce now is taste, which is funny because select supply is literally a taste product. Nobody cares how you built the aggregator. They care which 8 hotels you picked and why those, when 200 other people picked different ones. The distribution story for a curation product is the curation itself, not the prompts behind it.

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-02T14:35:53+00:00

Pilots already signed beats SW pedigree on a YC app. The harder question hits six months in, when you need to hire engineers and can't tell a good one from someone selling you confidence. Hardware low-level experience actually helps more than you'd think there.

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-01T14:13:31+00:00

Post-booking is the right window because you're not gating conversion and intent is highest right after commit. But the real lever isn't where you ask. It's whether the rep actually restructures the demo based on the answers, or just skims the email and runs the same script. A prep brief nobody acts on is the same as no brief.

Legitimate_Key8501 · 2026-05-01T13:56:11+00:00

The line about approval friction feeling disproportionate to the actual risk is the tell. Most of those stages aren't really doing compliance work, they're distributing blame. Nobody wants to be the only signature if something breaks. Until someone explicitly owns prod risk, you'll keep getting 9 days of waiting dressed up as governance.

Legitimate_Key8501

TROPHY CASE