Something i read in the earlier paragraphs about llms being easier to work with in greenfield projects…
My experience has been the opposite. They work well on existing projects but are not so great at new ones (unless you are just vibe coding something simple).
I think it has something to do with it being able to rely on years of established structure/conventions on existing projects that makes them better IME
My experience with greenfield is that when you're just starting out, you have to be really strict and careful about overall architecture, establish a framework, provide structure, separate concerns well.
If the project is not throwaway, this first set of iterations is critical, without guidance LLMs will just bolt on things and produce special-cased spaghetti, even the very-frontier models.
Once the framework is established, it's smooth sailing.
But I haven't gotten to "very large" size yet, I expect it produces another kind of coherence problems.
I’ve had a good experience with a greenfield project.
The single thing that seems to have helped is that we all agreed to use OpenSpec early on, and to commit the specs alongside the code.
I have no affiliation with OpenSpec and I don’t suspect it’s doing anything unique here, but having the intent develop alongside the code in the repository seems to have ensured that agents have a more holistic view of the project.
It’s a night/day difference when I use an agent against this codebase that integrates its changes using OpenSpec and those that ignore it.
My experience has been the opposite. They work well on existing projects but are not so great at new ones (unless you are just vibe coding something simple).
I think it has something to do with it being able to rely on years of established structure/conventions on existing projects that makes them better IME
If the project is not throwaway, this first set of iterations is critical, without guidance LLMs will just bolt on things and produce special-cased spaghetti, even the very-frontier models.
Once the framework is established, it's smooth sailing.
But I haven't gotten to "very large" size yet, I expect it produces another kind of coherence problems.
The single thing that seems to have helped is that we all agreed to use OpenSpec early on, and to commit the specs alongside the code.
I have no affiliation with OpenSpec and I don’t suspect it’s doing anything unique here, but having the intent develop alongside the code in the repository seems to have ensured that agents have a more holistic view of the project.
It’s a night/day difference when I use an agent against this codebase that integrates its changes using OpenSpec and those that ignore it.