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

You describe in plain English what you want and it writes the software. If you are a programmer then you may not be satisfied with what is written. If you aren’t a programmer then you will probably feel empowered, provided you can coax it to write something that works.

Here's my left-field pitch since everyone's shopping the A.IDEs - don't use them.

The polish of Cursor et al is a component of its dishonesty. You should keep the nature of the tool exposed to you at all times.

I say you should:

- identify the things about your personal development process that you'd like to streamline (up to and including not having to code everything by hand)

- write Python scripts that call LLMs (or don't!) to achieve the thing you want.

- heck, write library functions and establish some neat patterns - a random prompt picker using a folder of txt files, why not?

Not only can you create a development experience that approximates much of what Cursor does, you can make one that is twice as good for you because it is aligned with how you work, and how you think.

And at that point, with your fluent new workflow, making a simple VSCode extension to hook into your scripts can't be all that hard. At that point, how can Cursor compete?

This isn't going to be a tool recommendation but a learning path one. I recommend choosing a project to work on and then developing it using LLM assisted programming. The more niche and unique the problem, the less likely there's already a solution, and the more likely that the vast training data with a LLM will help you with that niche.

Ideally, you should try out all the tools. Each of them have advantages and disadvantages for each problem within a project. You might find that mixing and matching LLM apps gives you more expertise and skill over just sticking to your favorite.

There is no next level. LLMs can take care of menial tasks you understand well, but you need to focus on learning more of the basics before you try to find better shortcuts through them. You need to always be ahead of the LLM - any output or code it produces that you don't fully understand means death.

UX. Cursor is fundamentally no different from going to ChatGPT and asking it to write some code, but the Cursor UX is very nice. Shows you colored diffs of what it wants to change with accept/reject, chat window to flesh out ideas, etc. They get all the small UX details right (assuming you like a VS Code style experience).