I was picking up a ticket to write a new component this morning. A ‘stepper’ or a ‘counter’ component that is comprised of a numerical input and two buttons, one to increment the input, one to decrement.
We’ve recently filled our repo with agent skills. In this case, there is an “add new component” skill that takes the agent through the process of adding a new component.
- What type of component is it? Should it even be a component or is this a utility class or recipe or even a throwaway playground example?
- Is there a ticket for the component? If not, write one up with the spec for record keeping, including why we need it and why we settled on the implementation style.
- How to name props, events, slots and identify global value types.
- Where to branch from, how to run the component generator script and where to find the docs on component development style.
- What design tokens are available, how to handle accessibility needs in shadow and light DOM.
- How to write the stories and scaffold the tests. What types of each do we need? Unit vs E2E.
- How to handle documentation, where the docs should live, which bits are auto generated, what our writing style is.
- How to open a PR, what needs to go in the description, which branch should we set as the base.
I briefed the agent and watched it start to trawl through the process. I watched it type out its reasoning, explaining each step as it went through and as I read it I realised: I didn’t like the way it was doing it. I was watching a robot do the thing I enjoy and not doing it that well, for the sake of… speed? laziness? consistency?
It didn’t even seem that fast as it created the component skeleton, because it doesn’t have the 20 years of experience working in this style.
AI speeds me up sometimes. AI lets me complete tasks outside of my comfort zone. AI can even do a better job than me at some things.
But AI provides me the most benefit when it does things I don’t want to do. The boring bits. The bits that are just scouring Stack Overflow and GitHub issues and hoping. The bits I don’t understand. The bits I don’t want to understand.
Some bits of my job I love. Actually, most bits of my job I love. And I’m quite good at those bits, or at least I enjoy doing them and I’m very opinionated about how they should be done. I love scaffolding components, creating the props, writing elegant CSS, using a minimalist style that works with the web and doesn’t bypass it with tons of JavaScript.
It’s so easy to fall into the trap of always reaching for the AI. I’ll just get Claude to do that. It’ll be faster. I’ll just tweak it at the end. At the end, I’m just overwhelmed by output that is often “only ok”, but not “awesome”.
I want to make “awesome”. I enjoy making “awesome”.
The AI can do the dishes, I’m going to make things and have fun doing it.