Voice to Text to Deployed Code

iMessage conversation with my agent fixing the mobile layout

Let’s Unpack

Ok, there’s a lot to unpack there. First, yes I text my agent. And 2nd, yes it’s very fast at writing code.

I had just pushed the first blog post (all coding by AI) and was looking at my blog on my phone for the first time. I quickly realized it wasn’t mobile friendly. I was able to show this to someone and voice to text the fix which appeared almost instantly. She had experience managing developers and developing for mobile and it was just so obvious how this is a huge paradigm shift in software development.

How it used to work

Those of us that have wrestled with CSS, JavaScript, and HTML to get pages to layout just so know the drill. So much trial and error. Cmd-S, Cmd-Tab to the browser window, F5. Rinse and repeat ten times.

And those of us that developed for iOS/Android know an even deeper pain. At one point my mental model developing mobile UI was “best case scenario x 10”.

Fast forward — those days are gone, I do believe.

Vibecoding is a Slur

I’ve become a fan of Peter Steinberger and appreciate his thoughts on leveraging AI for development. There’s a good middle ground between AI-generated code slop and meticulously hand-written code. You have to understand how AI works to really get the value out of it. It’s both insanely capable and limited at the same time. It takes time and practice to get better at using Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, or even OpenClaw over text to make changes.

Make it Easy for AI to Work With Your Codebase

  • Code structure & documentation — It’s important to have a clear, logical architecture and structure to your codebase. Essential documentation needs to be pulled out of Confluence and put into .md files in the repo.
  • Context efficiency — An agent can’t load a whole complex codebase into context and always starts fresh. Give them what they need to know — but nothing more. With small codebases it doesn’t matter, but this is essential with a large codebase.
  • Be specific — Be as specific as possible on expectations, as well as your coding and testing conventions.
  • Have honest convos — Agents always try to please, but it’s better to give high-level problems and ask how to best solve them. Make sure it understands the broad strokes clearly to prevent cleanup later.

Thoughts Turn into Code Fast

I remember when I was early in my career thinking about complex coding challenges in the shower. I would then almost have to write down my thoughts for when I got back to my laptop. Now I can just send a text message, which can turn into a ticket to develop later or code changes that get pushed immediately. I can also talk back and forth about different approaches with the agent before development. Or I can just update a .md file in the repo to tackle things later.

Coding via voice-to-text over iMessage is pretty rad. Your phone stops being a consumption device and starts being a development environment.