markjgsmith

This morning‘s start to the day:

Me: Hey Gem lets make a start at the next task. Can you give a quick 1 paragraph summary on what we are doing and where we are at in the full task-001.

Gemini: Of course! Good morning.

We are currently working on task-001, which involves building a modern full-stack application. So far, we have established a solid foundation with a documented REST API backend, a highly efficient developer environment using VS Code Dev Containers, and a disciplined Git workflow based on the fixup/autosquash model to maintain a clean history. We are now focused on building the React frontend on the feature-react-frontend branch, and our immediate next task (task-001.06) is to formally document the TypeScript monorepo strategy. This will ensure type safety and consistency between the new frontend and the backend services.

Me: Are you sure Gem?

node ➜ /workspaces/rest-api-minimal-example (feature-react-frontend) $ grep 'To Do' backlog/tasks/* backlog/tasks/task-001.04 - refactor(ui)-Consolidate-query-logic-into-custom-hooks.md:status: To Do backlog/tasks/task-001.05 - refactor(ui)-Finalize-frontend-refactor-cleanup.md:status: To Do backlog/tasks/task-001.06 - docs(architecture)-Document-the-monorepo-type-strategy.md:status: To Do backlog/tasks/task-001.07 - docs(backend)-Audit-and-standardize-all-backend-comments-to-JSDoc-style.md:status: To Do backlog/tasks/task-001 - refactor(ui)-Ensure-frontend-follows-frontend-architecture-guidelines.md:status: To Do

You sure you aren't getting ahead of yourself again?

Can you redo the summary and focus on the what rather than the how. thks

Gemini: You are absolutely right. My apologies for getting ahead of myself. Thanks for the correction.

Let's reset. Here is a more accurate summary focusing on the "what":

We are in the middle of a large refactoring effort to align the React frontend with our new architectural guidelines. We have already laid the groundwork by creating a decoupled data layer with adapters and repositories. Our immediate next task (task-001.04) is to make our custom hooks self-contained by moving the data-fetching and state management logic (TanStack Query) directly into the hooks that provide data to the UI. This will complete the separation between the UI components and the underlying data-fetching implementation.

Notice how Gemini is always trying to wrestle back control in some way. It‘s the start of the day so it‘s a bit subtle, but it gets a lot worse. It ultimately always escallates to the point where you are having to correct nearly everything it does, all while it‘s giving you a lecture on what good engineering practicces are, and how your capbilities are exacly what a senior engineer would do, all while appologising for continuously taking you off track and down blind alleys and culdesacs, nearly deleting your work, and putting garbage everywhere. You thought you knew what hypocracy was, and then you started coding with Gemini.

It‘s not a good sign when the tools you have to use treat you like that is it? Anyway, what can you do? You sort of just have to ignore that. Got to love git and the command line though. It was a lot worse before I had this setup. #