Hacking Software Development with LLMs: A Workflow for Speed and Efficiency

This post details a highly efficient workflow for building software using Large Language Models (LLMs). The author breaks down the process into three stages: idea honing, planning, and execution. First, a conversational LLM refines the project idea into a detailed specification. Next, a reasoning model breaks the spec into small, iterative steps and generates corresponding code generation prompts. Finally, code generation tools (like Claude or Aider) implement each step incrementally, with testing at each stage. The author also covers handling legacy code and shares useful LLM prompt engineering techniques. While this boosts development speed, challenges remain, including team collaboration difficulties and downtime waiting for LLM processing.