Dark Mode: Tonkotsu did 63 tasks and I gave feedback

We launched dark mode for Tonkotsu earlier this week. It was written entirely by Tonkotsu with 63 completed tasks. My involvement was exclusively during planning and verification (the classic barbell shape described here).

Here's how it went...

Step 1: Plan

I started with Tonkotsu's planning agent and asked it to look at our frontend repo and formulate a plan for dark mode. I gave it general dark mode visual design guidance on selection of colors that our designer Sam formulated.

Tonkotsu researched our repo and proposed a plan, covering key decisions like where to store preferences, and how to propagate the setting throughout. I reviewed and gave feedback to cover a case the multi-window case, where the user may change the dark mode setting in one window and it should propagate to all other windows immediately.

Step 2: Coding

I then delegated all the tasks in the plan to Tonkotsu. It wrote a crap ton of code while I switched away to work on something else. Delegation ftw!

Step 3: Verify

As expected with a project like this, there were several gaps in the initial implementation. Most commonly, some elements still showed in light mode. There was also a tricky case where on app startup, the user identity needed to be resolved first before loading their dark mode setting. So follow-up work was needed.

We've designed Tonkotsu to address the reality of iterative workflows and so I just kicked off another plan and delegated the resulting tasks. The document interface makes this simple and natural.

Life as an Agent Manager

The best use of my time was in guiding the process during planning, and guardrailing quality during verification. The middle (coding) was where I could switch away to another work, scaling myself just as a manager does.

Give it a shot and enjoy dark mode!