One of the things I've been talking about with my senior developers is how the bottleneck has shifted even more dramatically to human code understanding vs code generation. AI is still not suitable for generating production grade code without a human checking it (yet), but it can produce a huge amount of code for humans to check. We've been experimenting with ai finding better ways of communicating what is in a change at different abstraction levels etc by always generating diagrams showing what it did etc, with the concept being that anything that can speed up human understanding of changes addresses the core bottleneck of the whole process.
Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?
11–20 of 247 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?
#12I have a custom harness that runs in a macOS VM. It has e-mail and its own accounts. I assign it tasks in Linear, it does them and spins up PRs for me to review. This works pretty well, generally. I have to spend time writing stories and doing code review, but I don’t have to follow its (their — I have 3 of them) every move.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?
#13Not being able to enter flow state is a very interesting observation. I've felt it too to the extent that I went down a whole new rabbit hole of what it means to be in flow state. Let me know if anybody here wants to know more, happy to post some links.
To answer your question - I discuss the approach with Claude Code (e.g., should I implement my own ACT model in JAX or PyTorch, Python or Rust or Julia, etc.). Then write the initial part of the code myself. Opening up a blank vscode is a simple joy of life I refuse to give up :-) I'll ask Claude for advice if I get stuck, it will helpfully offer to write that code for me, I obstinately decline. Eventually, I'll get bored of some minutiae or other, at which point I'll ask Claude to complete just that part of it.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?
#14If you like videos, I saw an interesting video yesterday about systems thinking, software as ecosystem particularly with AI. More of an overview but gives an insight into seeing where we might be able to experiment with different ways Its more focused on teams and companies than individual developers but I think it could be applied to the single dev.
"Software engineering at the tipping point" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n41YjR5QfU
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?
#15I don't think you would expect to get into a flow state if you were intermittently directing another (human) programmer to do work, and you shouldn't expect to with LLM-driven coding either. Perhaps you are best finding out ways to extend the length of time where the LLM can work without prompting, then use that downtime to focus on other tasks that will help you to guide it better the next time you need to prompt it.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?
#16I'm in the same boat and I'm not a fan on the current way of working of agents, but I think tooling is what needs to catch up.
So, I actually decided to try to tackle it myself and worked some months (full time) on it.
https://beolis.com is the result of that, it's a local cli in a kanban board style with a remote server to keep the team on track (I've been using it myself for some time and actually started to ask some friends to use it just yesterday -- feedback very welcome, I still wanted to do some additional things before asking more people to use it, but oh well, I'm a fan of building in public anyways and it's probably better to have feedback sooner rather than later).
The main point there is that you work mostly in the ticket description (your own spec) and the plan (the spec as the agent sees it, generated with a custom workflow) and then having another custom workflow to implement it (you can choose how you want it -- https://beolis.com/blog/post/custom-coding-workflows has some info on what I'm using myself).
As a result, at least for me, I do spend more time immersed in a flow state (although I'm in that state writing the specs and reviewing code -- although in some cases it's more work to write the spec in a way the agent can work when things get more complicated vs just diving into the code, so, going into "code" mode is something I still have to do, agents are definitely not perfect).
I guess I'm lacking in docs on how to effectively use it. I have plans to create a video next week and post it in the blog, so, if you're interested, keep track of it ;)
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?
#17I am currently in the process of launching my AI teams platform that I've been working on since at least January. It's https://PersonaStack.ai. I'm doing it without VC money and all by myself. I've used over 110B tokens so far building it.
You get some amazing results with teams of AIs if you do it right. The key is to control behavior with what integrations and responsibilities each agent has. That way they naturally adapt, delegate, fact check each other, and generally act more autonomously.
This is already running the automated news site ainews.personastack.ai complete with social media posts 100% automated.
It also runs the issue triage, coding, reviews, and releases for the Kuberhealthy open source CNCF project, which is another thing of mine.
I don't think the next step is really smarter models. It's how we make the models more effective, and teams, when done right, net the best results I've seen.
Hoping to get noticed here soon, but it's extremely hard to do solo I'm finding.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?
#18[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?
#19I am currently in the process of launching my AI teams platform that I've been working on since at least January. It's https://PersonaStack.ai . I'm doing it without VC money and all by myself. I've used over 110B tokens so far building it. You get some amazing results with teams of AIs if you do it right. The key is to control behavior with what integrations and responsibilities each agent has. That way they natural…
Doesn't this go directly against what the author is asking about? You're much less likely to enter flow state if you have a team of AI agents which are supposed to be autonomous.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?
#20> but I haven't been able to enter flow state like I can when I hand write code.
Fixing that for you.
I haven't been able to enter flow state like I can when I write code.