I would put myself in the 100x camp but my start in AI (and programming) was symbolic approaches in lisp/scheme, then I put that away for about a decade and got into NLP and then got into question answering and search/information retrieval. I have read probably at least 20 papers on LLMs a week every week since December 2022.
So I have some familiarity with the domain but I also would not exactly call myself an expert on LLMs. However, I would say I am confident I mostly understand what is required for good results.
Getting the best possible results requires:
- an LLM trained to have the "features" (in the ML/DL sense of the word) required to follow instructions to complete your task
- an application that manages the context window of the LLM
- strategically stuffing the context window with preferences/conventions, design information, documentation, examples, your git repo's repo map, and make sure you actually use rules and conventions files for projects.
Do not assume the LLM will be able to retrieve or conjure up all of that for you. Treat it like a junior dev and lead it down the path you want it to take. It is true, there is a bit of micromanagement required but Aider makes that very very simple to do. Aider even makes it possible to scrape a docs page to markdown for use by the LLM. Hooking up an LLM to search is a great way to stuff the context window BTW, makes things much simpler. You can use the Perplexity API with Aider and quickly write project plans and fetch necessary docs quickly this way; just turn that into markdown files you'll load up later after you switch models to a proper code gen model. Assume that you may end up editing some code yourself, Aider makes launching your editor easy though.
This mostly just works. For fun the first thing I did with Aider was to write a TUI chat interface for ollama and I had something I could post to github in about an hour or two.
I really think Aider is the missing ingredient for most people. I have used it to generate documentation for projects I wrote by hand, I have used it to generate code (in one of my choice languages) for projects written in a language I didn't like. It's my new favorite video game.
Join the Aider discord, read the docs, and start using it with Gemini and Sonnet. If you want local, there's more to that than what I'm willing to type in a comment here but long story short you also need to make a series of correct decisions to get good results from local but I do it on my RTX4090 just fine.
I am not a contributor or author of Aider, I'm just a fanatical user and devotee to its way of doing things.