AI-Driven Development Series
The Thinking Factory
Jon Leahy | Staff Software Engineer | Pismo/Visa
Personal exploration - not an official initiative
AI-Driven Development Series
The Thinking
Factory
AI-Powered Product Design
Part 3 is about
HOW to think.
The best code I ever wrote...
...came from the best
conversations I ever had.
Whiteboard sessions.
Debates.
What if AI could be
the conversation partner?
You've tried asking AI
to design something.
Generic output.
Something that could apply to
any product, any company,
any situation.
AI converges
to the mean.
You have Maria.
Maria is a senior architect
who's seen three failed rewrites.
"What happens
when this fails?"
The formula is simple.
They inject constraints.
Different personas...
...different trade-offs.
"How should we handle
user authentication?"
Security Architect
"OAuth with hardware keys. Non-negotiable."
"I've seen what happens when you cut corners on auth."
Enterprise Architect
"SAML integration.
They already have identity providers."
Different persona, different answer.
All valid.
None generic.
Now we scale this up.
Multiple personas
in conversation.
🔒
Security
"What attack vectors does this open?"
The debate pattern.
🔒
Security Agent
"This exposes user IDs in the URL.
That's an IDOR vulnerability."
👤
UX Agent
"But shareable links are critical.
Users need to send these to colleagues."
🔒
Security Agent
"Use opaque tokens instead.
Hash the ID with a per-user salt."
Convergence.
Both needs met.
Delays premature answers.
Forces consideration of edge cases.
Surfaces trade-offs explicitly.
Architecture Decision Records.
What we decided.
Why we decided it.
What we considered.
What we rejected.
The Thinking Pipeline.
Templates structure
the thinking.
The best code came
from conversations.
With experts who never tire.
Who push back on your assumptions.
Who surface edge cases.
Who document everything.
But you can repeat...
...the quality
of the thinking.
Build a writer's room.
For software.
The Thinking Factory
AI-Driven Development Series - Part 3