Yeah, I've gotta use skills more. I didn't quite get it until this last week when I used a skill that I made. I didn't know the skill got pulled into context ONLY for the single command being ran with the skill, I thought the skill got pulled into context and stayed there once it was called.

That does seem very powerful now that I've had some time to think about it.

Or you could argue that if the assistant needs so much modular context your tools are defective.

I avoid most MCPs. They tend to take more context than getting the LLM to script and ingest ouputs. Trying to use JIRA MCP was a mess, way better to have the LLM hit the API, figure out our custom schemas, then write a couple scripts to do exactly what I need to do. Now those scripts are reusable, way less context used.

I don't know, to me it seems like the LLM cli tools are the current pinnacle. All the LLM companies are throwing a ton of shit at the wall to see what else they can get to stick.

For Jira/Confluence, I also struggled with their MCPs. JIRA’s MCPs was hit or miss and Confluence never worked for me.

We don’t use the cloud versions, so not sure if they work better with cloud.

On the other hand, i found some unofficial CLIs for both and they work great.

I wrote a small skill just to give enough detail about how to format Epics, Stories, etc and then some guidance on formatting content and I can get the agent do anything i need with them.

I deal with a ton of different atlassian instances and the most infuriating thing to me about the mcp configuration is that atlassian really thinks you should only have one atlassian instance to auth against. Their mcp auth window takes you to a webpage where you can’t see which thing you are authoring against forcing you to paste the login page url into an incognito window. Pretty half baked implementation.

I noticed that it’s better for some things than others. It’s pretty bad at working with confluence it just eats tokens but if you outlay a roadmap you want created or updated in Jira it’s pretty good at that

I have had some positive experiences using the Jira and Confluence MCPs. However, I use a third-party MCP because my company has a data centre deployment of Jira and Confluence, which the official Atlassian MCP does not support.

My use case was for using it as an advanced search tool rather than for creating tickets or documentation. Considering how poor the Confluence search function is, the results from Confluence via an MCP-powered search are remarkably good. I was able to solve one or two obscure, company-specific issues purely by using the MCP search, and I'm convinced that finding these pages would have been almost impossible without it.

Why would you use Grok at all? The one LLM that they're purposely trying to get specific output from (trying to make it "conservative"). I wouldn't want to use a project that I outright know is tainted by the owners trying to introduce bias.

Do you think this is a gotcha?

You just prompt the llm to change the plan.

Yes to all of these.

Here's the rub, I can spin up multiple agents in separate shells. One is prompted to build out <feature>, following the pattern the author/OP described. Another is prompted to review the plan/changes and keep an eye out for specific things (code smells, non-scalable architecture, duplicated code, etc. etc.). And then another agent is going to get fed that review and do their own analysis. Pass that back to the original agent once it finishes.

Less time, cleaner code, and the REALLY awesome thing is that I can do this across multiple features at the same time, even across different codebases or applications.

There's comments like this because devs/"engineers" in tech are elitists that think they're special. They can't accept that a machine can do a part of their job that they thought made them special.

You just have another agent/session/context refactor as you go.

I built a skribbl.io clone to use at work. We like to play eod on Friday as a happy hour and when we would play skribbl.io we would try to get screencaps of the stupid images we were drawing but sometimes we would forget. So I said I'd use claude to build our own skribbl.io that would save the images.

I was definitely surprised that claude threaded the needle on the task pretty easily, pretty much single shot. Then I continued adding features until I had near parity. Then I added the replay feature. After all that I looked at the codebase... pretty much a single big file. It worked though, so we played it for the time being.

I wanted to fix some bugs and add more features, so I checked out a branch and had an agent refactor first. I'd have a couple context/sessions open and I'd one just review, the other refactored, and sometimes I'd throw a third context/session in there that would just write and run tests.

The LLM will build things poorly if you let it, but it's easy to prompt it another way and even if you fail that and back yourself into a corner, it's easy to get the agents to refactor.

It's just like writing tests, the llms are great at writing shitty useless tests, but you can be specific with your prompt and in addition use another agent/context/session to review and find shitty tests and tell you why they're shitty or look for missing tests, basically keep doing a review, then feed the review into the agent writing the tests.

Yeah, definitely a stupid take from OP. LLMs are very strong at using the frameworks, it makes it easier to hire people to work on your codebase, it makes it easier for future uses of LLMs since they'll have a lot of framework details in their training data, etc.

What hard problems are you working on?

I knew nothing about game development a few months ago. Now I've built a simple godot game. I'm sure the game is all pretty common (simple 2d naval combat game) but it's still impressive that a couple claude/gemini/codex cli sessions spit out a working game (admittedly, I'm not a professional artist, so THAT part of it has been painful since I can't rely on generative AI to do that, I have to do it myself with aesprite. But maybe a professional artist would know HOW to prompt for the artwork)

Agentic programming still needs devs/engineers. It's only going to take your lunch if you let it. And by that, I mean the FUD and complete refusal to give good faith attempts to use the ai/llm tools.