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Ask HN: How are you LLM-coding in an established code base?

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Re: Ask HN: How are you LLM-coding in an established code base?

#51

Post by siliconc0w »

* local development and speed are both important to me so I spend some effort ensuring our app can run fast locally both in a 'lightweight' mode with 'fakes' and in a slower/more accurate prod-like mode.

* We do enable agents to able to interact with the application locally via a browser and some app controls to enable testing certain scenarios but it's generally better to have them iterate by writing and running tests.

* I usually have about three agents going locally via codex/gemini CLIs in separate tabs using work-trees with an IDE to supervise and shepherd them along. Any more and I have trouble feeding them with work and supervising them. I also agree work-trees suck and sometimes I YOLO having agents collaborate on the same tree if I think it'll be less work.

* I use async web agents like codex but really only for paper-cut issues I'm reasonably confident the agent can one-shot or random experiments I'm curious about that I don't really intend to merge.

Right now it's mostly gemini/codex (sorry claude).

Re: Ask HN: How are you LLM-coding in an established code base?

#52

Post by mattmanser »

clbrmbr wrote: post #50
clbrmbr wrote: post #47

Heavy but manual Claude Code usage, always with —dangerously-skip-permissions which makes it an entirety different experience. I learned a lot from IndyDevDan’s videos on YT. Despite his sensationalism, he does quick reviews of new CC features that you just have to see to understand. Claude Code has replaced my IDE, though I do a little vim here and there. My favorite is Claude’s ability to do code archeology: findin…

Oh I should add that team adoption is mixed. A lot of folks don’t seem to see the value, or they don’t lean in very hard, or take the time to study the tools capabilities. We also have now to deal with the issue of really well-written PR messages and clean code that doesn’t do the right thing. It used to be that those things were proxies for quality. Better this way anyhow: code review focuses on if it’s really doing…

To summarize, other people are having to meticulously check the AI slop you're slinging into the system that looks good, but doesn't even do what its supposed to do. And you didn't even check it before submitting the PR?

Must be fun working with you.

Re: Ask HN: How are you LLM-coding in an established code base?

#53

Post by weikju »

adam_gyroscope wrote: post #6
bitbasher wrote: post #3

I generally vibe code with vim and my playlist in Cmus.

Man I was vim for life until cursor and the LLMs. For personal stuff I still do claude + vim because I love vim. I literally met my wife because I had a vim shirt on and she was an emacs user.

> I literally met my wife because I had a vim shirt on and she was an emacs user.

The editor wars are officially over. Thanks for your story!

Re: Ask HN: How are you LLM-coding in an established code base?

#54

Post by px1999 »

sergeyk wrote: post #15

> AFAICT, there’s no service that lets me: give a prompt, write the code, spin up all this infra, run Playwright, handle database migrations, and let me manually poke at the system. We approximate this with GitHub Actions, but that doesn’t help with manual verification or DB work. I think this is almost exactly what we've built with https://superconductor.dev - set up a project with one or more repos - set up your en…

My org has built internal tooling that approximates this. It's incredibly valuable from a manual test perspective though we haven't managed to get the agent part working well, app startup times (10+ min) make iterating hard.

Do you have customers who have faced/solved this problem? If so, how did they do it -- it seems like a killer on the approach?

Re: Ask HN: How are you LLM-coding in an established code base?

#55

Post by krackers »

qnleigh wrote: post #11

I would be very curious to hear about the state of your codebase a year from now. My impression was that LLMs are not yet robust enough to produce quality, maintainable code when let loose like this. But it sounds like you are already having more success than I would have guessed would be possible with current models. One practical question: presumably your codebase is much larger than an LLM's context window. How do…

LLMs currently seem to be very myopic in their planning. Current benchmarks that are being targeted such as SWEbench all reward short-term correctness and completeness, without taking into account long-term refactorability.

In fact, the two are in a sense at odds with each other: refactoring things sometimes means explicitly _disobeying_ the user prompt to "get things done", and going on a side-quest to clean things up. You could manually prompt the LLM to go out and refactor things, but doing that requires _you_ to read the code and identify places that seem suboptimal.

Re: Ask HN: How are you LLM-coding in an established code base?

#56

Post by doug_durham »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #12

We're not. At ardour.org we've banned any and all LLM-generated code (defined as code that was either acknowledged to be LLM-generated or makes us feel that it was). This is based on continual (though occasional) experiments asking various LLMs for solutions to actual known problems with our code, and utter despair at the deluge of shit that it produces (which you wouldn't recognize as shit unless you knew our existi…

Use the tools that work for you. If your customers are happy and you are hitting your deadlines then there is no problem. No one is insisting that you do otherwise.

Re: Ask HN: How are you LLM-coding in an established code base?

#57

Post by sergeyk »

px1999 wrote: post #54
sergeyk wrote: post #15

> AFAICT, there’s no service that lets me: give a prompt, write the code, spin up all this infra, run Playwright, handle database migrations, and let me manually poke at the system. We approximate this with GitHub Actions, but that doesn’t help with manual verification or DB work. I think this is almost exactly what we've built with https://superconductor.dev - set up a project with one or more repos - set up your en…

My org has built internal tooling that approximates this. It's incredibly valuable from a manual test perspective though we haven't managed to get the agent part working well, app startup times (10+ min) make iterating hard. Do you have customers who have faced/solved this problem? If so, how did they do it -- it seems like a killer on the approach?

Our foundational design value was compute instance startup speed. We've made some design decisions and evaluated several "neocloud" providers with this goal in mind.

Currently, from launching an agent to that agent being able to run tests in our Rails docker-compose environment (and to the live app preview running), is about 30 seconds. If that agent finishes their work and goes to sleep, and then hours later you come back to send a message, it'll wake up in about the same time.

(And, of course, you can launch many agents at once -- they're all going to be ready at roughly the same time.)

Re: Ask HN: How are you LLM-coding in an established code base?

#58

Post by __mharrison__ »

adzicg wrote: post #22

We use claude code, running it inside a docker container (the project was already set up so that all the dev tools and server setup is in docker, making this easy); the interface between claude code and a developer is effectively the file system. The docker container doesn't have git credentials, so claude code can see git history etc and do local git ops (e.g. git mv) but not actually push anything without a review.…

This is very similar to what I teach clients. However, my process involves more TDD. I use tests as guardrails to keep the AI from doing something silly and to prevent regressions.

Re: Ask HN: How are you LLM-coding in an established code base?

#59

Post by __mharrison__ »

magmostafa wrote: post #43

We've found success using a hybrid approach with LLMs in our codebase: 1. Context-aware prompting: We maintain a .ai-context folder with architecture docs, coding standards, and common patterns. Before asking the LLM anything, we feed it relevant context from these docs. 2. Incremental changes: Rather than asking for large refactors, we break tasks into small, testable chunks. This makes code review much easier and r…

Would you be willing to share a custom linting rule?

Re: Ask HN: How are you LLM-coding in an established code base?

#60

Post by giancarlostoro »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #14

> AFAICT, there’s no service that lets me: give a prompt, write the code, spin up all this infra, run Playwright, handle database migrations, and let me manually poke at the system. We approximate this with GitHub Actions, but that doesn’t help with manual verification or DB work. What you want is CI/CD that deploys to rotating stating or dev environments per PR before code is merged. If deployment fails you do not a…

Typo: I wrote "stating or dev" meant to write "staging or dev" whoops
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