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Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?

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Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?

#41

Post by joblemblem »

anonzzzies wrote: post #31
joblemblem wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reply. I would like to explore this more if you are willing. Do you consider yourself a “developer”? What is your title at said company? Do you write code for yourself or for this business? Who determined and what criteria define who “cannot be a client facing consultant”? What is an “in house builder”? What were these “fulltime devs” that you said “you don’t need anymore” doing before these llms? Do y…

> Do you consider yourself a “developer”? What is your title at said company? Yes , for the past 40 years. And CTO/co-founder. > Do you write code for yourself or for this business? I have been writing DSL, code generators and other tooling for the past around 20 years for this company. Before that I did the same thing for educational software (also my company). > Who determined and what criteria define who “cannot b…

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

It sounds like you already had 20+ years of human made tooling already built and you use the llm to orchestration and onboarding.(?)

I’m glad you found a solution that works for you.

I could see that use case.

When I did consulting work the initial onboarding of new clients to my tooling was a lot drudge work, but I definitely felt my job was more about the work after that phase of satisfying requests for additional features, and updating out of date methods and technologies.

I wonder what your plans are for when your tools fall out of date or fail to satisfy some new normal?

Hire ”seasonal” programmers again? Or have an llm try to build analogues to what your developers built those precious 20+ years?

(‘precious’ was a typo of ‘previous’ but I left it in because I thought it was funny)

Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?

#42

Post by oxidant »

joblemblem wrote: post #39
Ldorigo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always stumped by comments like this. I'm at a point where ~70% of my code is AI-written, and the majority of the remaining is mostly because it would take too much time to provide enough context to the tool/LLM of choice for it to be able to produce the code I need. Given the right context and the right choice of model/tools, I think ~90-95% of the code I write could be generated. And this is not for doing trivi…

Two recent examples. Please link to your history when you get one of these things to build my example so I can see how you managed to do it. First, a friend without technical knowledge wanted to query an API using SQL. (At a previous firm he learned how to write “SELECT * FROM … WHERE …” statements.) He asked one of these llms to do this, that he paid a premium for, and it suggested installing VSCode and writing an e…

This isn't a knock on you. The prompt (including additional context like specific examples/docs) has an incredible influence on the output.

Do you know what your friend asked? "Query an API with SQL" sounds like you're sending SQL with POST api[.]com/query. What you built is more like

"Make a request to this endpoint, using these parameters, and store it in sqlite. This is the shape of the data coming back and this is what I want the table(s) to look like."

Gpt4o or Claude could easily write that five line script, if given the right information.

I find writing prompts and working with LLMs to be an entirely new way of thinking. My struggle has been to learn how to write out my tacit knowledge and be comfortable iterating.

Do you still have your conversation where you tried to build the Docker project?

Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?

#43

Post by nuancebydefault »

joblemblem wrote: post #38
nuancebydefault wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am a developer with >25 of professional experience. I am unable to get these things to do anything useful. I am a developer with >25 of professional experience. I was able to do useful things with these tools from day one of trying. This puzzles me so much every time reading such. Either I am more stupid than average and I just think the results are more useful then I can come up with, or maybe I have a knack for…

> or are you smarter than those results? “Smarter than” are your words. I’ve just yet to get any real utility from them. > When I read such comments I ask myself, do you even use stackoverflow I find this a strange comparison. I’ve yet to see people replacing employees with “stack overflow” or M$FT shoe horning “stack overflow” into their flagship product or former NSA members joining the board of “stack overflow” or…

To me the SO comparison makes sense.

5 years ago (and up to this day) when I stumbled into a non obvious problem, i resorted to a search engine to read more about the context of such problem. Often a very similar question had been posed on SO. There a problem/solution pair was presented very similar to mine. I did the translation between the proposed solution into mine. This all made perfect sense to me, and dozens of colleagues did the same.

Today you can do the same with an LLM, with the difference that often the LLM does the translation, in often very complex ways, from a set of similar problem/solution pairs into my particular problem/solution pair. It also can find out if some set applies or not, to my particular problem. I can ask it more questions to find out if/why the solution is good.

So that alone is a very big timesaver. But in fact what I described is just the tip of the iceberg in ways the LLM helps me.

So now my question is, do you use such SO problem/solution pairs for help, or do you simply find things out by a lot of thinking combined with reading and experimenting?

Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?

#44

Post by fragmede »

joblemblem wrote: post #11

I’m exhausted by these types of posts. I am a developer with >25 of professional experience. I am unable to get these things to do anything useful. I’ve tried: different models, limiting my scope, breaking it down to small tasks, prompt “engineering”; and am still getting less than useless results. I say less than useless, because I will then additionally waste time debugging or slamming my head against the wall the…

I’m exhausted by these types of posts.

They never include concrete details on what they're trying to do. what languages they're using, what frameworks, which LLM. They occasional state which tool, but then don't go into detail how they're using it. There's never any links to chats/sessions showing the prompts they're giving it and the answers they're finding so unacceptable.

Imagine if you got bug reports from customers with that little detail.

Actual in-depth details would go a long way to debugging why people are reporting such different experiences.

It takes a back and forth exchange with the LLM for it to make progress. Expertise in using an LLM is not just knowing what to prompt it, but more importantly, when to stop, fix the code yourself, and keep going. Without throwing baby out with the bathwater just because you still had to do something by hand, where the baby is "using an LLM. in the first place".

If I had to guess though, I think that's where people differ. Just like with every skill there's a beginners plateau and you hit a wall and have to push through (fatigue/boredom/disillusionment/etc). If the way you're using the LLM means you haven't gotten a hallucination by then, and you've seen how wildly more productive and how it's able to take away some of the bullshit in programming; if no bad stuff has hit the wall and you take to it like a fish in water, you can push through some of the dumber errors it makes.

If, however, you are doing something esoteric (aka not using JavaScript/python) and are met with hallucinations and scrutinize every line of code it produces, even going into it with an open mind, it's easier to give up and just stop there. That may not even be the wrong thing to do! Different programmers deliver value in different ways. You don't want Gilfoyle when you need Richard Hendriks, or vice versa, a company needs both of them.

So: show us the non-functional wall on GitHub the LLM built, or even just name the language used and the library it hallucinated.

But again, getting perfect code out of the LLM is a non-goal, don't get distracted by it. LLM-assisted or not, you get graded on value derived from code that actually gets committed and sent for review and put into production. So if the LLM is being dumb, go read and fix the code, give it your fixed code, and move on with your life, or at least into the next TODO/ticket.

Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?

#45

Post by jcinau »

joblemblem wrote: post #39
Ldorigo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always stumped by comments like this. I'm at a point where ~70% of my code is AI-written, and the majority of the remaining is mostly because it would take too much time to provide enough context to the tool/LLM of choice for it to be able to produce the code I need. Given the right context and the right choice of model/tools, I think ~90-95% of the code I write could be generated. And this is not for doing trivi…

Two recent examples. Please link to your history when you get one of these things to build my example so I can see how you managed to do it. First, a friend without technical knowledge wanted to query an API using SQL. (At a previous firm he learned how to write “SELECT * FROM … WHERE …” statements.) He asked one of these llms to do this, that he paid a premium for, and it suggested installing VSCode and writing an e…

Share my experience. I tried 3-4 different LLMs, and one of them is outstanding.

For code samples, popular programming languages are much better than languages like Clojure.

Two examples: About a week ago, I had found Myers' string diff algorithm and asked to write some code and initially it spat out Python code. I asked it write a Common Lisp code, and it generated about 90% complete code. I rewrote it again and the whole thing took less than a day. It was my first time seeing 'quality' from machine generated code.

I experimented further. I found Automerge-Java and want to write a Clojure wrapper. So asked it how to parse Java source files and it showed a Python code. I ran it and gave some feedback than I could get almost perfect output, which is easy to process from Clojure side. After three days, I could write interface generator. From my experience, this type of work is time consuming process and three days is pretty good I think. I fed it concrete patterns and pointed mistakes less than ten times.

Overall, it still lacks of 'creativity' but for concrete examples with 'right' patterns, saves a huge amount of time.

Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?

#46

Post by purple-leafy »

I’m using Claude currently to breakdown how to tackle a top down gaming project in JavaScript/HTML using the Canvas API and TypeScript and template strings - no frameworks.

Eg: Camera positioning, game loop, frame rate vs character speed, game logic, where it should all go etc.

So far I have a green blob being drawn to the screen and moving smoothly to the right.

It’s actually quite fun, I’m enjoying it mostly because I’m not using a framework (for once). Also fun declaring my own DOM manipulation utilities similar to JQuery ($, $$ etc)

We use React daily at work, I think I’m a bit sick of React. Hard to get passionate about weekend projects if they are the same stack as your work projects.

Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?

#47

Post by Ldorigo »

joblemblem wrote: post #39
Ldorigo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always stumped by comments like this. I'm at a point where ~70% of my code is AI-written, and the majority of the remaining is mostly because it would take too much time to provide enough context to the tool/LLM of choice for it to be able to produce the code I need. Given the right context and the right choice of model/tools, I think ~90-95% of the code I write could be generated. And this is not for doing trivi…

Two recent examples. Please link to your history when you get one of these things to build my example so I can see how you managed to do it. First, a friend without technical knowledge wanted to query an API using SQL. (At a previous firm he learned how to write “SELECT * FROM … WHERE …” statements.) He asked one of these llms to do this, that he paid a premium for, and it suggested installing VSCode and writing an e…

As the other commenter said, prompting is everything, and most LLMs are sycophants and will try to do anything you tell them without pausing to tell you "why the hell are you trying to query an API with SQL? That's not what SQL is for". While it's possible to build stuff with llms with little to no technical knowledge, it's still very hit and miss.

With that said, the space is moving incredibly fast and the latest Claude/GPT-o1 are far ahead of anything that was available 3-6 months ago. Unfortunately Claude doesn't allow sharing publicly like ChatGPT, but here is a gist of Claude's answer for +- the same question your friend asked:

https://gist.github.com/ldorigo/1a243218e00d75dd2baaf0634640...

I'm on mobile so it wasn't handy to quickly paste an example API request/documentation for the LLM to follow; so there's a chance it might have hallucinated some if the API parameters - but if I included that; in my experience the code would work on first shot 90% of the time.

Regarding your second query, I'm too unfamiliar with clojure and the two solutions you mentioned to really understand what you were trying to achieve, but if you explain just a little bit more, I'm happy to record a screencast of me figuring it out with llms/genai tools from the ground up. What do you mean with "a container solution that allows for live coding"?

Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?

#49

Post by fragmede »

emptiestplace wrote: post #25
joblemblem wrote: post #11

I’m exhausted by these types of posts. I am a developer with >25 of professional experience. I am unable to get these things to do anything useful. I’ve tried: different models, limiting my scope, breaking it down to small tasks, prompt “engineering”; and am still getting less than useless results. I say less than useless, because I will then additionally waste time debugging or slamming my head against the wall the…

I started with BASICA and GWBASIC in the 80s, and though I've had some diversions, I would say there haven't been many days since where I haven't thought about solving problems with code. I still don't feel particularly qualified to answer, but I guess I probably am. > Are all of these posts just astroturfed?! I ask that sincerely. This is amusing to me - since GPT 4 or so, I've been wondering if the real fake grass…

>> Are all of these posts just astroturfed?! I ask that sincerely.

>This is amusing to me - since GPT 4 or so, I've been wondering if the real fake grass is actually folks saying this shit is useless.

Heh. If you really wanna conspiracy theory it, if you wanted positive marketing copy to sepl people on using an LLM, would you just use plain ChatGPT, or, because you're in the industry, would you post ernest-sounding anti-LLM messages, then use the responses as additional training data for fine-tuning LLMtoolMarketerGPT, and iterate from there?

Re: Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?

#50

Post by anonzzzies »

joblemblem wrote: post #41
anonzzzies wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you consider yourself a “developer”? What is your title at said company? Yes , for the past 40 years. And CTO/co-founder. > Do you write code for yourself or for this business? I have been writing DSL, code generators and other tooling for the past around 20 years for this company. Before that I did the same thing for educational software (also my company). > Who determined and what criteria define who “cannot b…

Thanks for taking the time to answer. It sounds like you already had 20+ years of human made tooling already built and you use the llm to orchestration and onboarding.(?) I’m glad you found a solution that works for you. I could see that use case. When I did consulting work the initial onboarding of new clients to my tooling was a lot drudge work, but I definitely felt my job was more about the work after that phase…

Well, it's one of my businesses so I will probably sell it. I have others which I like a lot more and they have more staying power (and are less bothered by AI, although it helps, but not enough yet; my favorite business is a business which does very urgent emergency software repairs: the current LLMs are way too hallucinatory for that ; it's wasting too much time and really solid tooling I haven't managed to build around it; you cannot imagine how terrible, and therefor unique/diverse, software around the world is).
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