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Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?

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Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?

#21

Post by dm3 »

I find LLMs via Aider great for:

* code translation - e.g. convert a self-contained implementation of a numerical algorithm from one language to another and generate test cases and property tests which make sure the implementations are equivalent. The goal is to avoid having to proof read the generated code.

* one-off scripts - any task where code design doesn't matter, the amount of code is limited to couple hundred lines (GPT-4o) and the result will be thrown away after use.

* API exploration - producing examples for APIs and languages I'm not fluent in. Reading reference documentation gives a better understanding, LLMs get the results out faster.

Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?

#22

Post by thierrydamiba »

dm3 wrote: post #21

I find LLMs via Aider great for: * code translation - e.g. convert a self-contained implementation of a numerical algorithm from one language to another and generate test cases and property tests which make sure the implementations are equivalent. The goal is to avoid having to proof read the generated code. * one-off scripts - any task where code design doesn't matter, the amount of code is limited to couple hundred…

Why aider?

Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?

#23

Post by jamil7 »

aeze wrote: post #17

I use Cursor primarily with Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Overall a solid productivity increase depending on the task. I have a few observations: - I vastly prefer Cursor's Copilot++ UX for autocomplete compared to GitHub's in VSCode, which I used until a few months ago. - The Composer multi-file editor (cmd+i) is easily its most powerful feature and what I use most often, even when I'm working on single files. It just works be…

Pretty similar observations. Using Aider with Claude on an iOS app I’ve it can be helpful to scaffold new modules for example, if I give it some existing code and tell it to copy the conventions. But it’s virtually useless for editing or changing code where it will often produce code that doesn’t compile, has bugs and/or doesn’t solve the requirements.

Anything to do with Swift concurrency it’s completely hopeless, I assume partly because there’s not enough training data yet.

Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?

#24

Post by pjc50 »

kleiba wrote: post #13

People who use code completion LLMs: is your company running a local install, or are they fine with your code getting shared with LLMs in the cloud?

Our company is very not OK with sharing IP with the cloud to the extent that we only recently started using github. So we're banned from using these things.

Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?

#25

Post by Cu3PO42 »

kleiba wrote: post #13

People who use code completion LLMs: is your company running a local install, or are they fine with your code getting shared with LLMs in the cloud?

I use GitHub Copilot at work. We were (and still are) not allowed to use our private accounts, but recently got company accounts we are allowed to use on codebases classified "confidential" or lower. We also have an internal chat interface to OpenAI's models with a similar restriction. I understand there's some extra agreements with Microsoft regarding our data.

Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?

#26

Post by threeseed »

For common languages e.g. Python, Javascript it works reasonably well although it still seems to prefer older versions of libraries way too often. Which means you need to do refactoring straight out of the bat.

Whenever I use it with Rust, Golang, Scala etc it's not worth the effort.

Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?

#27

Post by kleiba »

pjc50 wrote: post #24
kleiba wrote: post #13

People who use code completion LLMs: is your company running a local install, or are they fine with your code getting shared with LLMs in the cloud?

Our company is very not OK with sharing IP with the cloud to the extent that we only recently started using github. So we're banned from using these things.

Then why are you using github at all?

Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?

#28

Post by npteljes »

I use it as a personal assistant, and as a replacement of internet search. It has been working great for things like refactoring small parts of code, generating boilerplate or working out what an arcane error message can mean. I find it useful for comparing two technologies, and to have it give me a refresher about some topic.

On a personal assistant level, it's been useful to have me remind of words that I have forgotten, or to have it rephrase a sentence in a different way, to suit some mood, etc.

Occasionally I have fun with it by having it answer in rhymes, or theatrically like a fortune teller, or like lyrics of some gangsta rap.

I don't know about performance increases. What I notice most is that I'm less annoyed with it, than with the general state of the internet. The web pages and I have different goals: I want a specific piece of information, and they want me to load all their ads, affiliates and such in return, and to spend time on the page reading their drivel. It is also horrible to search for version-specific information, for example, I appreciate that it brings up the Ruby answer for the latest version, but I'm stuck on 2.5.0, and so, I need that specifically. LLMs are usually great at this. Orders of magnitude less fluff, rich text-only answer.

Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?

#30

Post by imathew »

I haven't liked any integrated tooling at all, but that's not such a surprise since I generally disable autocomplete and autocorrect since, like tinsel, I find them distracting.

I do really like to use the plain web browser tools, though (currently claude), for generating boilerplate code that I then review and integrate carefully into my code. It has sped up my workflow in that way.

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