Justin Searls

A developer shares their evolved workflow for AI-assisted coding, focusing on practical approaches over complex tooling. They use multiple parallel instances of OpenAI's codex CLI as their primary development environment, running 3-8 agents simultaneously in the same codebase. The author advocates for simplicity: direct conversation with AI agents, minimal custom tooling, and avoiding over-engineered solutions like elaborate subagent systems or RAG implementations. Key practices include atomic git commits by agents, using screenshots for context, spending 20% of time on AI-driven refactoring, and developing intuition about task complexity ("blast radius"). They prefer GPT-5-codex over Claude Code for its language style, efficiency, and reliability, despite some quirks. The workflow emphasizes speed and pragmatism, with agents handling virtually all code writing while the developer focuses on architecture, design decisions, and feature planning.