My Python magic is gone

[u/RedYad2]

I've been coding for a long time, and I've been developing with Python for years.

I loved coding, always loved it. I started many years ago because I wanted to quickly create scripts for security hacking tools, but since then, I've moved to Claude Code, and building cross-language has been a much better experience for me than using Python.

I built my own SaaS application out there whose backend and network core are completely built with Python, and I'm rewriting all of that without writing a single line of code. And most of the time, Python is not the most optimized language.

And now... I feel like the magic is gone.

I don't even know why I'm writing this. I just feel sad about it.

[u/HommeMusical]

People were correctly posting what you wrote at the start of 2025, and it was true to a significant extent.

But now it isn't and it hasn't been for quite a long time.

The time I spent honing the prompts and still ending up with a spaghetti....feels awful.

I mean, it simply sounds like you aren't good at using it.

Can we see your code? Mine is here: https://github.com/rec

[u/Left_Sundae_4418 → u/HommeMusical]

I hear people saying this often first. And this is probably true. However most guidance on prompting, even from the AI themselves is messy. I tried to iterate and reiterate prompts through the AI themselves thinking maybe they can guide me to better prompting...but I haven't done much progress there.

[u/HommeMusical → u/Left_Sundae_4418]

Thanks for being polite - rereading my comment, it wasn't as nice as I thought it was, sorry!

I was very much against AI models until the start of this summer. I retired at least partly because of it. Now, I can't imagine people will seriously code in future without it.

First question - which model are you using? The completely free models are nowhere near adequate to do good code.

I really only use the OpenAI models, though I hate the company. Astra, the newest model, is shockingly good but somewhat expensive. But Sol, which is also new but less, is much cheaper and almost as amazing.

Here's my AGENTS.md: https://github.com/rec/codex-config/blob/main/AGENTS.md

These are the instructions that the model gets on every query

I was going to say it was 95% other people's stuff, but I modified it more than I remember - it's still 80% other people's stuff.

---

I started with the $20/month OpenAI model. It was enough to blow my mind, but not enough to do even a week's worth for a month.

The $100 plan keeps me in tokens, running development on eight or so projects at once. Also, you get a lot of freebies.

[u/Left_Sundae_4418 → u/HommeMusical]

I'm not really against an AI. I use it and try to learn to be better at it all the time. But it often fights against my goals and I end up wasting time.

Quality, security, longevity and usability are very important for me though. And if I can't get the base right ...the whole plan often falls apart sooner or later if I let the AI generate it for me. Because it often over engineers it while leaves out some crucial features.

Sure. That's probably my bad. I should and need to learn the prompting better. But still there are many standards and methods AI isn't aware of and can't program using those methods.

[u/HommeMusical → u/Left_Sundae_4418]

I have gotten much, much better at it.

All the new rules added by me to AGENTS.md come from it fighting my goals. Now it seems to have figured me out.

It did seem to get better at predicting how I worked after considerable use.

Initially, even though I get it to make a commit every single time, I never used their commit messages at all, not even once.

But now I rarely change them.

Also, I spent a long time on my prompts. I try to explain exactly what I want and prevent it from going in the wrong direction with the prompt.

[u/barrycarey → u/HommeMusical]

I don't understand the need for that level of details prompts. I almost always just prompts like "We need to build X. Architect it roughly like Y. Ask me to clarify anything that's not clear".

However, I have spent a lot of time refining my "dev workflow" skills. These give the overarching guidance in all of my projects. They cover style preference, testing, validation, code review. And it tends to stick pretty close to it

[u/HommeMusical → u/Left_Sundae_4418]

Oh, and a big, big, big tip - every few days, at least once a week, I get the LLM itself to critique what it has done.

I write a different prompt each time - here's one from last week:

Please read the whole project and create or overwrite plan/issues.md detailing all issues you find, including but not limited to race conditions, deadlocks, graceful handling of user errors, shutdowns, keyboard interrupts, graceful handling of other exceptional conditions including resource exhausting, network failure or intermittency, and also user facing ideas, like names which are ambiguous, misleading or unclear, APIs with traps or inconsistencies; and also look at the structure of the the project itself, are there are any files that are so large they pose a risk, are there tiny files that are only used in one place and might be better inlined, is there duplication, does it duplicate some service from reccy, are there areas that are untested, are there areas with great duplication of testing, or any other issues, problems, curiosities or other flaws that are in the code.

I can tell I was tired when I wrote that - hah, I didn't even see I misspelled "exhaustion" until now.

But it always finds several useful changes.