Ask HN: What's the best way to get started with LLM-assisted programing?

No matter what, the current paradigm is the "mixture of experts", aka defining roles and then switching between the roles. In the case of Aider, you're mainly looking at "architect" and "code". Others like Cline/Roo provide also this, but more limitations and access to MCP. Honestly, I would avoid these more advanced tools until you get an understanding for how everything works.

Begin with your "architect" and agree on a design, then act as an engineering manager to guide your "code" model to implement the tests. Once you have a full test suite, make sure that you can use commands like `/lint` and `/test` to call your toolchain as needed.

I personally prefer this method (again, when you're getting started) because it's independent of every IDE and will work anywhere you have a terminal. After you get comfortable, you'll quickly want to use a more advanced tool to trade your money for the time of the machine(s). When you get to that point you'll understand what the fuss is about.

Couple of helpful tidbits we’ve learned:

- Define a read me that lays out your architecture. Normalization, libraries to use for different use cases, logging requirements, etc. reference it on every new task.

- keep notebooks from getting too big. A notebook per elt action or table definition make’s your compares faster and required context smaller.

Be prepared to be amazed. We’ve pointed Cline at an api doc and had it spit out elt code and a model that were nearly production ready. We’re pulling weeks off estimates…

I used VSCode as my default IDE so the switch was very natural.

I am working on machine learning in bio, and many of the tools, methods, and data structures are very domain specific. Even so, the agent feature is good enough that for most tasks, I can describe the functionality I want and it gets me 80% of the way there. I pay $20 a month for Cursor and it has quickly become the last subscription I would cancel.