Yep. This is the only model that has worked well for me for more than a decade.

Does House of Lords have any real power today?

Sort of. They can and do amend bills, but they can't overrule the Commons on anything the latter regards as important.

"Important" is quite a high bar in this case though if the House of Lords is insistent enough to actually vote something down. The cost in terms of parliamentary time for the government these days of using the Parliament Acts is very high (especially for things which government would normally do via secondary legislation), and it also requires at least a one year delay; by extension the potential political cost to the government of using the Parliament Acts to pass something unpopular or controversial is set at a high enough bar that it's an effective veto.

This feels like quite a sensible safety valve to me.

With a very small number of exceptions, including changing the maximum duration of Parliament from 5 years.

You don't need most of this. Prompts are also normally what you would say to another engineer.

* There is a lot of duplication between A & B. Refactor this.

* Look at ticket X and give me a root cause

* Add support for three new types of credentials - Basic Auth, Bearer Token and OAuth Client Creds

Claude.md has stuff like "Here's how you run the frontend. here's how u run backend. This module support frontend. That module is batch jobs. Always start commit messages with ticket number. Always run compile at the top level. When you make code changes, always add tests" etc etc

I agree with this. There is not a lot of harnesses/wrapping needed for Claude Code.

You don't need a harness beyond Claude Code, but honestly it's foolish to think you shouldn't be building out extra skills to help your workflow. A TDD skill that does red-green-refactoring is using Claude Code exactly as how it's meant to be used. They pioneered skills.

Yep, not saying we don't need skills. Just harnesses.

We have a very uncomplicated setup with claude code. A CLAUDE.md with instructions and notes about the repo and how to run stuff. We also do code reviews with Claude Code, but in a separate session.

It works wonderfully well. Costs about $200USD per developer per month as of now.

Regarding the self-congratulation machine - I simply use a different claude code session to do the reviews. There is no self-congratulation, but overly critical at times. Works well.

Honestly, sometimes the harnesses, specs, some predefined structure for skills etc all feel over-engineering. 99% of the time a bloody prompt will do. Claude Code is capable of planning, spawning sub-agents, writing tests and so on.

Claude.md file with general guidelines about our repo has worked extraordinarily good, without any external wrappers, harnesses or special prompts. Even the MD file has no specific structure, just instructions or notes in English.

The article, however, says 93% wanted daylight savings in the linked public engagement report.

I have to give this a try. My current model for backend is the same as how author does frontend iteration. My friend does the research-plan-edit-implement loop, and there is no real difference between the quality of what I do and what he does. But I do like this just for how it serves as documentation of the thought process across AI/human, and can be added to version control. Instead of humans reviewing PRs, perhaps humans can review the research/plan document.

On the PR review front, I give Claude the ticket number and the branch (or PR) and ask it to review for correctness, bugs and design consistency. The prompt is always roughly the same for every PR. It does a very good job there too.

Modelwise, Opus 4.6 is scary good!

Everyone seems to have different ways to deal with AI for coding and have different experiences. But Armin's comment quoted in the article is spot on. I have seen a friend do exactly the same thing, vibe coded an entire product hooked to Cursor over three months. Filled with features no one uses, feeling very good about everything he built. Ultimately it's his time and money, but I would never want this in my company. While you can get very far with vibe coding, without the guiding hands and someone who understands what's really going on with the code, it ends up in a disaster.

I use AI for the mundane parts, for brainstorming bugs. It is actually more consistent than me in covering corner cases, making sure guard conditions exist etc. So I now focus more on design/architecture and what to build and not minutea.

What disaster befell your friend after those three months?

Several, but I can't quite say it here. And I meant it for the codebase, not the person themselves

This has happened to me too. Claude has stopped and said on occasions "this is a big refactor, and will affect UI as well. Do you want me to do it?"

I recently asked Claude to make some kind of simple data structure and it responded with something like "You already have an abstraction very similar to this in SourceCodeAbc.cpp line 123. It would be trivial to refactor this class to be more generic. Should I?" I was pretty blown away. It was like a first glimpse of an LLM play-acting as someone more senior and thoughtful than the usual "cocaine-fueled intern."