I'd rather fucking die.
because?
Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?
41–50 of 78 posts
Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?
#42We have our own tooling; it's very good and definitely increases productivity for most. One observation is that people who are bad at reading code seem often to be get negatively impacted vs writing themselves. So from our teams I think that code reading will be more valuable than writing, if it was not already. Just having a loop of telling the llm something, running it and then tell what's wrong with the observed result is very slow vs reviewing the code and tell what's wrong with it instead.
We also use cursor, copilot, claude dev, aider and plandex to see if anything is beating anything else and to get ideas from for our toolkit.
Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?
#43I 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…
> 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.
That is the exact problem I am trying to solve: modifying code with LLMs really sucks most of the time. I am trying a solution with Abstract Syntax Trees: I have the LLM write the code that will write the code you need. That is, modify the source tree rather than the text representation.
I wrote about my approach here: https://codeplusequalsai.com/static/blog/prompting_llms_to_m...
I do have it working for some cases quite well, but there are lots of pitfalls with this approach too. It does take a lot of context and the LLMs aren't really that well-versed at writing specifically esprima code for example. BeautifulSoup does work better, I guess because more people use it and there's more data in the training set.
I'm adding one language at a time, currently have HTML, CSS, Javascript and Python all kind-of working. It's pretty neat but I'm not sure how well it scales yet to larger projects and more difficult requirements/implementations.
Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?
#44Until recently I was only using Copilot as an advanced autocomplete and to help writing tests, for which it's pretty useful.
A couple weeks ago I had to create some classes (typescript) implementing a quite big spec for a file format to transfer quizzes between applications. I decided to try some more advanced tool, ending up with Cursor and continue.dev. I copied the spec (which are public on the web) into a text file and used them as context, together with a skeleton start for the main class I needed, and experimented with different engines and different prompts.
The end result is that I got a very good starting point for my code, saving me many hours. Surprisingly, for this task, the best result was generated by Gemini 1.5 pro.
Since then I've been trying to integrate these tools more into my day to day programming, with varying results, but I'm now convinced that, even with the limits of the current LLMs, this technology can have a much higher impact on programming with better harnessing, eg integrating it with compiler/code analysis tools output and automated testing.
Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?
#45Right now I'm working on my first large clojure codebase, so I do a lot of "what is the idiomatic way to do X?" questioning, pasting in small functions and asking if there's a good simplifying refactor etc. Before this I was writing a lot of numpy and doing a lot of math, so it was a lot of "there's what I want to calculate, how do I make numpy do that?".
I use Claude now that they've successfully made chatgpt too insufferable to use.
I haven't tried any of the special AI editors since I don't know if I would survive the traumatic injury of having emacs taken away from me.
Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?
#46It is fine for expanding CSVs, test data, static arrays and similar. Not comfortable using it as part of an editor or cloud services generally.
Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?
#47Writing documentation, amongst other things, has been a save for me.
I use it to understand new codebases quickly, create the documentation boilerplate for the code I'm working on that needs better docs, or update/rewrite outdated ones.
When the codebase fits in the context window, it's simple. But even if I'm working on a larger thing, it takes a bit of RAG-alike effort to build knowledge topology, and then it's super easy to get docs on (the actual!) architecture, specific components, and all the way down to atomic function level.
Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?
#48I 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 much the same, except I use github copilot. I have exactly the same remarks, but I also use it to generate test cases, and I use in addition Microsoft Copilot for:
- Writing docstrlings. It helps to have a template.
- rubber duck. II try to explain my issue to it. It doesn't find the solution 90% of the time, but explaining the issue helps me (and sometimes you get a hint)
Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?
#49Like many others I'm working on my own tool [1] that helps me make progress in my hobby projects. An example outcome of using this tool is my js13k game [2] (the idea and majority of code). The tool is being developed using the tool itself (inception ;)).
This experience of developing such tool is invaluable, I doubt I would be able to learn so much about LLMs and AI service providers if I was using some off-the-shelf software. It also allows me to adjust it to my own needs, while the "main stream" tools usually try to please "large enterprise customers", so as a regular user you end up living with annoying bugs/quirks, that will never be fixed (because no large customer asks for it).
In my opinion the future of such tools is multi modal (both input and output). For my specific use case (hobby gamedev) the goal is to eventually become "the idea guy", who occasionally jumps into the code to perform some fun programming task, and is not able to create assets(GFX/SFX) themselves.
For example: when I'm using my tool, and I want to fix a problem like misaligned buttons, instead of typing an exhaustive prompt, I rather prefer to paste a screenshot, and formulate task with just few words ("align those buttons").
Re: Ask HN: How have you integrated LLMs in your development workflow?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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. That is the exact problem I am trying to solve: modifying code with LLMs really sucks most of the time. I am trying a solution with Abstract Syntax Trees: I have the LLM write the code that will write the code you need. That is, modify the source tree rather…
Interesting! Bookmarked, I’ll read through it.