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Agentic Coding Recommendations

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Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#91

Post by spacechild1 »

vultour wrote: post #68
petesergeant wrote: post #11

Randomly, my advice: don't sleep on this. Three or four weeks ago I was posting how LLMs were useful for one-off questions but I wouldn't trust them on my codebase. Then I spent my week's holiday messing around on them for some personal projects. I am now a fairly committed Roo user. There are lots of problems, but there is incredible value here. Try it and see if you're still a hold-out.

I spent a good part of yesterday attempting to use ChatGPT to help me choose an appropriate API gateway. Over and over it suggested things that literally do not exist, and the only reason I could tell was that I spent a good amount of time in the actual documentation. This has been my experience roughly 80% of the time when trying to use an LLM. I would like to know what is the magical prompt engineering technique th…

I'm having a very good experience with ChatGPT at the moment. I'm mostly using it for little tasks where I don't remember the exact library functions. Examples:

"C++ question: how do I get the unqualified local system time and turn into an ISO time string?"

"Python question: how do I serialize a C struct over a TCP socket with asyncio?"

"JS question: how do I dynamically show/hide an HTML element?" (I obviously don't write a lot of JS :-D)

ChatGPT gave me the correct answers on the first try. I have been a sceptic, but I'm now totally sold on AI assisted coding, at least as a replacement for Google and StackOverflow. For me there is no point anymore in wading through all the blog spam and SEO crap just to find a piece of information. Stack Overflow is still occasionally useful, but the writing is on the wall...

EDIT: Important caveat: stay critical! I have been playing around asking ChatGPT more complex questions where I actually know the correct answer resp. where I can immediately spot mistakes. It sometimes gives me answers that would look correct to a non-expert, but are hilariously wrong.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#92

Post by danielbln »

dimitri-vs wrote: post #67
Keats wrote: post #33

I've been trying Claude Code with Sonnet 4.0 for a week or so now for Rust code but it feels really underwhelming (and expensive since it's via Bedrock right now). Everytime it's doing something it's missing half despite spending a lot of time planning at the beginning of the session. What am I missing?

Same. I have a very efficient workflow with Cursor Edit/Agent mode where it pretty much one-shots every change or feature I ask it to make. Working inside a CLI is painful, are people just letting Claude Code churn for 10-15 minutes and then reviewing the diff? Are people even reviewing the code?

This sort of asynchronous flow will become more and more mainstream. chatgpt.com/codex, Google's Jules and to a degree Claude Code (even though that's local) are all following that pattern: phrase a goal, send it off to the agent, review the diff and request changes, rinse and repeat until ready for PR review.

For me this only works for fairly tightly scoped tasks that aren't super complex, but it does work. And I think the days of staring down the IDE will be coming to a close for all but the most complex coding tasks in the future.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#93

Post by [deleted] »

spacechild1 wrote: post #91
vultour wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a good part of yesterday attempting to use ChatGPT to help me choose an appropriate API gateway. Over and over it suggested things that literally do not exist, and the only reason I could tell was that I spent a good amount of time in the actual documentation. This has been my experience roughly 80% of the time when trying to use an LLM. I would like to know what is the magical prompt engineering technique th…

I'm having a very good experience with ChatGPT at the moment. I'm mostly using it for little tasks where I don't remember the exact library functions. Examples: "C++ question: how do I get the unqualified local system time and turn into an ISO time string?" "Python question: how do I serialize a C struct over a TCP socket with asyncio?" "JS question: how do I dynamically show/hide an HTML element?" (I obviously don't…

[deleted]

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#94

Post by simonw »

vultour wrote: post #68
petesergeant wrote: post #11

Randomly, my advice: don't sleep on this. Three or four weeks ago I was posting how LLMs were useful for one-off questions but I wouldn't trust them on my codebase. Then I spent my week's holiday messing around on them for some personal projects. I am now a fairly committed Roo user. There are lots of problems, but there is incredible value here. Try it and see if you're still a hold-out.

I spent a good part of yesterday attempting to use ChatGPT to help me choose an appropriate API gateway. Over and over it suggested things that literally do not exist, and the only reason I could tell was that I spent a good amount of time in the actual documentation. This has been my experience roughly 80% of the time when trying to use an LLM. I would like to know what is the magical prompt engineering technique th…

Which model did you use?

I find using o3 or o4-mini and prompting "use your search tool" works great for having it perform research tasks like this.

I don't trust GPT-4o to run searches.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#95

Post by simonw »

phito wrote: post #41
petesergeant wrote: post #11

Randomly, my advice: don't sleep on this. Three or four weeks ago I was posting how LLMs were useful for one-off questions but I wouldn't trust them on my codebase. Then I spent my week's holiday messing around on them for some personal projects. I am now a fairly committed Roo user. There are lots of problems, but there is incredible value here. Try it and see if you're still a hold-out.

I will definitely sleep on agents. Normal LLM use, fine, but I am not giving up reasoning.

What's your definition of "agents" there?

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#96

Post by simonw »

hsuduebc2 wrote: post #34

Can someone recommended some source for vibe coding eg. how to prompt it properly, what tools to use? Does someone have any experience on anything other than small projects from scratch?

I wrote this a few months ago. The advice still holds but it only has a short section about coding agents so it's less relevant today than it was when I wrote it: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#97

Post by iDont17 »

soulofmischief wrote: post #19
v5v3 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There was a worry that code would become big mud balls that only AI understand, but it looks like the opposite." For now...

As long as interfaces are well defined, comprehensive tests are written, memory is safely handled and time complexity is analyzable, who cares what the rest of the code looks like. I understand programming for the sake of programming, chasing purity and really digging into the creative aspects of coding. But I get that same kick out of writing perfect interfaces, knowing that the messier the code underneath is, the m…

Yeh, exactly. Code doesn’t matter. Correct and stable electrical states matter.

Energy based models and machines that boot strap from models, organize their state to a prompt are on their way. The analog hole for coders is closing.

Most software out there is the layers of made up tools and such to manage and deploy software. We’ll save a lot of cycles pruning it all for generic patterns.

5-10 more years it’s all hardware again. Then no longer need to program a computer like it’s 1970.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#98

Post by redman25 »

GardenLetter27 wrote: post #78
darkxanthos wrote: post #48

I stumbled into Agentic Coding in VS Code Nightlys with co-pilot using Claude Sonnet 4 and I've been silly productive. Even when half my day is meetings, you wouldn't be able to tell from my git history. My thinking now is removed from the gory details and is a step or two up. How can I validate the changes are working? Can I understand this code? How should it be structured so I can better understand it? Is there mo…

I trust it more with Rust than Python tbh, because with Python you need to make sure it runs every code path as the static analysis isn't as good as clippy + rust-analyzer.

That's true typed languages seem to handle the slop better. One thing I've noticed specifically with rust is that agents tend to overcomplicate things though. They tend to start digging into the gnarlier bits of the language much quicker than they probably need to.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#99

Post by chuckadams »

rolisz wrote: post #72
chuckadams wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So using agents forces (or at least nudges) you to use go and tailwind Not even close, and the article betrays the author's biases more than anything else. The fact that their Claude Code (with Sonnet) setup has issues with the `cargo test` cli for instance is hardly a categorical issue with AIs or cargo, let alone rust in general. Junie can't seem to use its built-in test runner tool on PHP tests either, that does…

I tried Junie in PyCharm and it had big problems with running tests or even using the virtual environment set up in PyCharm for that project. You'd expect more from the company that is developing both the IDE and the AI agent...

JB's product strategy is baffling. The AI assistant is way more featureful, but it's a lousy agent. Junie is pretty much only good as an agent, but it's hardwired to one model, doesn't support MCP, but does have a whole lot of internal tools ... which it can't seem to use reliably. They really need to work on having just one good AI product that does it all.

I really liked Augment, except for its piggish UI. Then they revealed the price tag, and back to Junie I went.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#100

Post by apwell23 »

darkxanthos wrote: post #48

I stumbled into Agentic Coding in VS Code Nightlys with co-pilot using Claude Sonnet 4 and I've been silly productive. Even when half my day is meetings, you wouldn't be able to tell from my git history. My thinking now is removed from the gory details and is a step or two up. How can I validate the changes are working? Can I understand this code? How should it be structured so I can better understand it? Is there mo…

> you wouldn't be able to tell from my git history.

I can easily tell from git history which commits were heavily AI generated

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