Walking Skeleton

The Walking Skeleton is the minimum, crappy implementation of an end-to-end system that has all of the pieces you need. The point is to get the end-to-end system working first, and only then start improving the various pieces. I can still remember Jacob Steinhardt telling me about this trick while I was a PhD student at Stanford, and it has stuck with me ever sense.

In the era of LLM coding, it has never been easier to get the entire system working. By using the system, it becomes obvious what the next steps should be. Get to that point as soon as possible. The LLM can’t dogfood the code it writes!