feat: add new link 'Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI'

Author: limulus

www/links/2026/04/07/eight-years-wanting-building-ai/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+---
+tags:
+  - article
+  - link
+author: eric
+linkTitle: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
+date: 2026-04-07 21:10:01 -07:00
+linkUrl: https://lalitm.com/post/building-syntaqlite-ai/
+viaUrl: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/5/building-with-ai/
+teaser: >-
+  Lalit Maganti and I have a similar experience with the need to constantly refactor when
+  building a project with a coding agent.
+---
+
+Lalit Maganti wrote a [remarkable account][link] of building [syntaqlite] using Claude Code:
+
+> If you’re using AI to generate code at industrial scale, you _have_ to refactor constantly
+> and continuously. If you don’t, things immediately get out of hand. This was the central
+> lesson of the vibe-coding month: I didn’t refactor enough, the codebase became something I
+> couldn’t reason about, and I had to throw it all away. In the rewrite, refactoring became
+> the core of my workflow. After every large batch of generated code, I’d step back and ask
+> “is this ugly?” Sometimes AI could clean it up. Other times there was a large-scale
+> abstraction that AI couldn’t see but I could; I’d give it the direction and let it
+> execute.
+
+The whole post is worth reading. With the project I have been working on I have been having
+similar experiences. Especially the need to always prioritize refactoring.
+
+My current project recently reached the point where it was getting hard to reason about
+areas of responsibility, so I decided it needed to be refactored into a monorepo. In non-AI
+time, this is something I would have sat on for a while longer before begrudgingly taking it
+on. But in AI-time, delaying this refactor would mean compounded deterioration of my
+understanding of how the pieces of the codebase are interconnected.
+
+Currently, I’m keeping a `BACKLOG.md` file in my project. It’s just a handful of sections
+with bullet lists of to-dos. Right at the top is a section for refactors. If I think of a
+refactor it becomes the very next thing to work on. I have yet to regret doing a refactor
+before doing more feature work.
+
+[syntaqlite]: https://lalitm.com/post/syntaqlite/