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Agentic Coding Recommendations

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#121

Post by jnwatson »

diggan wrote: post #60
fvdessen wrote: post #3

I find it excellent news that all the techniques that make agentic coding more efficient also make human coding more efficient. There was a worry that code would become big mud balls that only AI understand, but it looks like the opposite. Clear code is important for AI productivity, so it now matters even more, because the difference of productivity is immediately and objectively measurable. Before AIs what code was…

> There was a worry that code would become big mud balls That's always been a worry with programming (see basically all Rich Hickey talks), and is still a problem since people prefer "moving fast today" instead of "not having 10 tons of technical debt tomorrow" LLMs makes it even easier for people to spend the entire day producing boilerplate without stopping for a second to rethink why they are producing so much boi…

Literally less than an hour ago, I reviewed a bunch of LLM-generated boilerplate. I then told the agent to show me a plan to refactor it. I suggested some tweaks, and then it implemented the plan and then tested that it didn't break anything.

It isn't much different than dealing with an extremely precocious junior engineer.

Given how easy it is to refactor now, it certainly makes economic sense to delay it.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#122

Post by diggan »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #10
benob wrote: post #2

> This is not an advertisment for Claude Code. It's just the agent I use at the moment. What else is there? Alternatives that are similar in their user experiences are OpenCode, goose, Codex and many others. There is also Devin and Cursor's background agents but they work a bit different in that they run in the cloud. What do you recommand to get a Claude-code-like experience in the open-source + local llm ecosystem?

Aider is almost there, in fact it's intentionally "not" there. You can set it up to do things like run test/static analysis automatically and fix errors, and work with it to get a to-do list set up so the entire project is spec'd out, then just keep prompting it with "continue...". It has a hard coded reflection limit of 3 iterations right now, but that can also be hacked to whatever you want. The only thing missing…

> The only thing missing for full agentic behavior is built in self prompting behavior.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Aider still doesn't do proper tool calling? Last time I tried it, they did it the "old school" way of parsing out unix shell commands from the output text and ran it once the response finished streaming, instead of the sort of tool call/response stuff we have today.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#123

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

bgwalter wrote: post #102

Well, the author's previous blog posts were shorter (e.g., https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2022/1/30/unsafe-rust/ ) and more succinct. I've no idea what he is saying here. It is all about vaguely defined processes and tools and people increasingly adopt an LLM writing style.

> and people increasingly adopt an LLM writing style.

If you are insinuating that this is written by an LLM: it is not.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#124

Post by tough »

diggan wrote: post #114
linguistbreaker wrote: post #111

My take on choice of language: 1) Java has the largest, oldest and most explicit data set for the LLM to reference, so it's likely to be the most thorough, if not the most correct. 2) Go with the language YOU know best because you'll be able to spot when the LLM is incorrect, flawed in its 'reasoning', hallucinating etc.

> Java has the largest, oldest and most explicit data set for the LLM to reference That seems to be a recommendation for coding with LLMs that don't have access to tools to look up APIs, docs and 3rd party source-code, rather than something you'd chose for "Agentic Coding". Once the tooling can automatically figure out what is right, what language you use matters less, as long as source code ends available somewhere…

I have been learning Go, Swift, and Rust with the help of LLM/ Agents.

basically the terser/safer syntax and runtime compilation errors are a great tight feedback loop for the agent to fix stuff by itself.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#125

Post by jnwatson »

km144 wrote: post #83
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…

> Is there more we can add to the AI conventions markdown in the repo to guide the Agent to make fewer mistaken assumptions? Forgive my ignorance, but is this just a file you're adding to the context of every agent turn or this a formal convention in the VS code copilot agent? And I'm curious if there's any resources you used to determine the structure of that document or if it was just a refinement over time based o…

I just finished writing one. It is essentially the onboarding doc for your project.

It is the same stuff you'd tell a new developer on your team: here are the design docs, here are the tools, the code, and this is how you build and test, and here are the parts you might get hung up on.

In hindsight, it is the doc I should have already written.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#126

Post by andnand »

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…

Whats your workflow? Ive been playing with Claude Code for personal use. Usually new projects for experimentation. We have Copilot licenses through work so I've been playing around with VS Code agent mode for the last week. Usually using 3.5, 3.7 Sonnet or 04-mini. This is in a large Go project. Its been abysmal at everything other than tests. I've been trying to figure out if I'm just using the tooling wrong but I feel like I've tried all the "best practices" currently. Contexts, switching models for planning and coding, rules, better prompting. Nothings worked so far.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#127

Post by square_usual »

diggan wrote: post #117
ajdidbdbsgs wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Last night I had a file with 38 mypy errors Fixing type checker errors should be one the least time consuming things you do. This was previously consuming a lot of your time? A lot of the AI discourse would be more effective if we could all see the actual work one another is doing with it (similar to the cloudflare post).

> AI discourse would be more effective if we could all see the actual work one another is doing with it Yes, this is a frequent problem both here and everywhere else. The discussions need to include things like exact model version, inference parameters, what system prompt you used, what user prompt, what code you gave it, what exactly it replied and so much more details, as currently almost every comment is "Well, I…

There's many examples of exactly what you're asking for, such as Kenton Varda's Cloudlfare oauth provider [1] and Simon Willison's tools [2]. I see a new blog post like this with detailed explanations of what they did pretty frequently, like Steve Klabnik's recent post [3], which while it isn't as detailed has a lot of very concrete facts. There's even more blog posts from prominent devs like antirez who talk about other things they're doing with AI like rubber ducking [4], if you're curious about how some people who say "I used Sonnet last week and it was great" are working, because not everyone uses it to write code - I personally don't because I care a lot about code style.

[1]: https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider/

[2]: https://tools.simonwillison.net/

[3]: https://steveklabnik.com/writing/a-tale-of-two-claudes/

[4]: https://antirez.com/news/153

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#128

Post by physicles »

haiku2077 wrote: post #104

> Context system: Go provides a capable copy-on-write data bag that explicitly flows through the code execution path, similar to contextvars in Python or .NET's execution context. Its explicit nature greatly simplifies things for AI agents. If the agent needs to pass stuff to any call site, it knows how to do it. I believe this is considered a bad practice: the general attitude is that the only sane use case for valu…

Agreed on all points.

The only place I’ve encountered this pattern is in chromedp, the go wrapper for the chrome headless browser driver. Its API… isn’t good.

Most methods you use are package globals that take a context.Context as a first parameter. But you have to understand that this context is a _special_ one: you can’t pass any old context like context.Background(), you must pass a context you got from one of the factory methods.

If you want to specify a timeout, you use context.WithTimeout. Clever I guess, but that’s the only setting that works like that.

It’s essentially a void*.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#129

Post by diggan »

jnwatson wrote: post #121
diggan wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was a worry that code would become big mud balls That's always been a worry with programming (see basically all Rich Hickey talks), and is still a problem since people prefer "moving fast today" instead of "not having 10 tons of technical debt tomorrow" LLMs makes it even easier for people to spend the entire day producing boilerplate without stopping for a second to rethink why they are producing so much boi…

Literally less than an hour ago, I reviewed a bunch of LLM-generated boilerplate. I then told the agent to show me a plan to refactor it. I suggested some tweaks, and then it implemented the plan and then tested that it didn't break anything. It isn't much different than dealing with an extremely precocious junior engineer. Given how easy it is to refactor now, it certainly makes economic sense to delay it.

But I'm guessing you're doing those refactors because you know they're ultimately worth it, because you have experience programming since before LLMs?

Like I know boilerplate and messy code sucks because I've had to work with it, without LLMs, and I know how much it sucks. I think you do too, but I think we know that, because we had to fight with it in the past.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#130

Post by [deleted] »

linguistbreaker wrote: post #111

My take on choice of language: 1) Java has the largest, oldest and most explicit data set for the LLM to reference, so it's likely to be the most thorough, if not the most correct. 2) Go with the language YOU know best because you'll be able to spot when the LLM is incorrect, flawed in its 'reasoning', hallucinating etc.

[deleted]
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