That’s our job now, figuring out how to get useful work out of our new armies of cheap genius alien developers. Putting a system in place so they can autonomously build and maintain the stuff that brings value to our customers.
You figure out what you want built, get crisp about the requirements, and walk away and let AI build it. That’s the dream anyway.
But if you’re just prompting Claude directly, you’ll quickly find yourself babysitting the process. Even with a solid plan and tools like plan mode, you’re still guiding the implementation step by step, prompting, reviewing, correcting, and figuring out what to do next.
Getting out of that takes two things, a methodology and a harness to run it.
The methodology gets you from deciding what you want to delivered software that actually meets those requirements. That’s what the Enso Method does. Requirements, technical design, implementation, reviews and tests, with loops to find what’s missing and go back and fix it.
But a methodology still needs something to run it. You can’t just put the whole thing into one giant prompt to Claude and say go. You implement a phase, start another chat for the next phase, and so on. Then run audits to look for missing acceptance criteria, missing/weak tests, then implement them. All of these are separate chat sessions which can take maybe an hour to complete, and they wait on you to manually kick off each subsequent session.
That’s the part I built Kiln to handle, and I’m releasing it today.
You and the agent do the requirements and planning together. Then Kiln orchestrates the sessions and loops that carry the plan through implementation and auditing, without you prompting it through every step. Start it before bed, let it work all night, and you can wake up to a pull request. If something needs your judgment along the way, it stops and gives you a command to resume the session directly.
Kiln is free and open source, runs on your own machine, and works with Claude Code or Codex.
Whether you use these tools or something else, the goal is the same. Put a system in place that frees you up to figure out the next thing worth building.
