395: From Code Writer to Code Editor: My AI-Assisted Development Workflow

Hey, it's Arvid and this is the Bootstrap founder. Today, you will learn exactly how I code or I guess rather how I make machines do my bidding and why that is both highly effective and has changed my coding forever. And it's also surprisingly anxiety inducing. But first, here's something that reduces my anxiety. The episode you're listening to is sponsored by paddle.com, my merchant of record payment provider of choice. They're just taking care of all the things related to money so that founders like me and you can focus on building the things that only we can build. And I don't wanna have to deal with the anxiety that comes with, like, taking people's credit cards or whatever. Paddle handles all of that for me. Sales tax, credit cards failing, all of that recovery. I highly recommend it. So please go and check it out at paddle dot com. There's something deeply unsettling about being traumatically more productive while also feeling like you're barely working. If you've been using AI over the last couple months, you might have felt like this too. All of the sudden this thing is doing stuff for you. And what should you do now? Should you also work? Should you do something else or watch it work? It's wild. There's a strange dichotomy that I find myself in every day now with AI assisted coding. And I use that quite a bit. My output has multiplied significantly over the last few months. I think that might even be an understatement. It's been five x 10 x. It's a lot yet. I often feel like I'm under utilizing my own time. It's probably the most interesting and confusing part of how I build software today and how I would never have thought I would build software just a couple of years ago. So this shift has been so massive that I can barely recognize how I used to work in the past. And the difference isn't just in the tools. It's in the whole role that I play as a developer. I wanna share exactly how this works for me at this very point, like in this moment, how I code, because I think we're witnessing this fundamental transformation in what it means to build software. And if you haven't tried it just yet, maybe this is gonna inspire you to give it a shot. And if you are trying it, maybe this is going to give you a couple of hints and pointers as to how to optimize it and make it even more magical. So let me walk you through what I actually did today earlier before recording this, just to show you how I build software right now because it perfectly illustrates the new workflow that I've developed. So whenever I need to build something that extends existing code, whether I wrote it myself or I wrote it previously through a different kind of prompt, I found that the most …