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Agentic Coding Recommendations

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Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#151

Post by BeetleB »

tonnydourado wrote: post #65

Gotta say, 100/200 bucks monthly feels prohibitively expensive for even trying out something, particularly something as unproven as code-writing AI, even more particularly when other personal experiences with AI have been at the very least underwhelming, and extra particularly when the whole endeavor is so wrapped up in ethical concerns.

Try Aider with API usage. Learn how to control context size (/clear, /add, /drop). Limit context to 25K. Use whatever model you want (Sonnet 4 or Gemini 2.5 Pro).

For simple scripts, it often costs me under $1 to build. I'm working on a bigger tool these days, and I've done lots of prompts, a decent amount of code, over 100 tests, and my running total is right now under $6.

I'd suggest learn the basics of using AI to code using Aider, and then consider whether you want to try Claude Code (which is likely more powerful, but also more expensive unless you use it all the time).

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#152

Post by polskibus »

andnand wrote: post #126
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 f…

My experiments with copilot and Claude desktop via mcp on the same codebase suggest that copilot is trimming the context much more than desktop. Using the same model the outputs are just less informed.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#153

Post by haiku2077 »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #116
haiku2077 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use context.Context for this you give up a lot of type safety and generally make your data passing opaque. It's totally fine to put multiple values into a different data bag type that has explicit, typed fields. For example, the Echo framework has its own strongly typed and extensible Context interface for request scoped data: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/labstack/echo#Context

> If you use context.Context for this you give up a lot of type safety and generally make your data passing opaque. The data passing maybe, not sure how you lose type safety. The value comes from the context with the right type just fine. The stuff that I'm attaching to the context are effectively globals just that this way you can enable proper isolation in tests and else. From my limited experience with echo, the c…

Context.Value's signature is Value(any) any - you have to use type conversion or reflection to determine the value's type at runtime, instead of a compile-time check.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#154

Post by bluefirebrand »

Leynos wrote: post #150
bluefirebrand wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 The thing is, code that does all of the things you listed here is good looking code almost by definition If AI was anywhere near capable of producing this quality then it would be so thrilling, wouldn't it? But it's not. The consensus see…

Do you give the agent a style guide? Do you perform (or have another agent perform) code reviews on the agent's code? Do you discuss architecture and approach with the agent beforehand and compile that discussion into a design and development plan? If you don't do these things, then you're just setting yourself up for failure.

Ah yes the tried and true "you're holding it wrong"

By the time I did all the stuff you're suggesting, I could just build the damn thing myself

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#155

Post by skydhash »

Leynos wrote: post #150
bluefirebrand wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 The thing is, code that does all of the things you listed here is good looking code almost by definition If AI was anywhere near capable of producing this quality then it would be so thrilling, wouldn't it? But it's not. The consensus see…

Do you give the agent a style guide? Do you perform (or have another agent perform) code reviews on the agent's code? Do you discuss architecture and approach with the agent beforehand and compile that discussion into a design and development plan? If you don't do these things, then you're just setting yourself up for failure.

That’s just the hallmark of good software engineering or do you think everyone else was cowboy coding things with Vim before?

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#156

Post by SparkyMcUnicorn »

andnand wrote: post #126
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 f…

Switch to using Sonnet 4 (it's available in VS Code Insiders for me at least). I'm not 100% sure but a Github org admin and/or you might need to enable this model in the Github web interface.

Write good base instructions for your agent[0][1] and keep them up to date. Have your agent help you write and critique it.

Start tasks by planning with your agent (e.g. "do not write any code."), and have your agent propose 2-3 ways to implement what you want. Jumping straight into something with a big prompt is hit or miss, especially with increased task complexity. Planning also gives your agent a chance to read and understand the context/files/code involved.

Apologies if I'm giving you info you're already aware of.

[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/copilot-customiza...

[1] Claude Code `/init`

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#157

Post by BeetleB »

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 spent a good part of yesterday attempting to use ChatGPT to help me choose an appropriate API gateway.

If you mean the ChatGPT interface, I suspect you're headed in the wrong direction.

Try Aider, with API interface. You can use whatever model you like (as you're paying per token). See my other comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44259900

I mirror the GP's sentiment. My initial attempts using a chat like interface were poor. Then some months ago, due to many HN comments, I decided to give Aider a try. I had put my kid to bed and it was 10:45pm. My goal was "Let me just figure out how to install Aider and play with it for a few minutes - I'll do the real coding tomorrow." 15 minutes later, not only had I installed it, my script was done. There was one bug I had to fix myself. It was production quality code, too.

I was hooked. Even though I was done, I decided to add logging, command line arguments, etc. An hour later, it was a production grade script, with a very nice interface and excellent logging.

Oh, and this was a one-off script. I'll run it once and never again. Now all my one-off scripts have excellent logging, because it's almost free.

There was no going back. For small scripts that I've always wanted to write, AI is the way to go. That script had literally been in my head for years. It was not a challenging task - but it had always been low in my priority list. How many ideas do you have in your head that you'll never get around to because of lack of time. Well, now you can do 5x more of those than you would have without AI.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#158

Post by BeetleB »

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.

> Normal LLM use, fine, but I am not giving up reasoning.

Ouch! Reminds me of:

- I'm never going to use cell phones. I care about voice quality (me decades ago)

- I'm never going to use VoIP. I care about voice quality (everyone but me 2 decades ago).

- I'm never going to use a calculator. I am not going to give up on reasoning.

- I'm never going to let my kids play with . I care about good manners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#159

Post by BeetleB »

phito wrote: post #71
bananapub wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is kind of a weird position to take. you're the captain, you're the person reviewing the code the LLM (agent or not) generates, you're the one asking for the code you want, you're in charge of deciding how much effort to put in to things, and especially which things are most worth your effort . all this agent stuff sounded stupid to me until I tried it out in the last few weeks, and personally, it's been great -…

If I have to review all code code it's writing, I'd rather write it myself (maybe with the help of an LLM). > anyway, obviously do whatever you want, but deriding something you've not looked in to isn't a hugely thoughtful process for adapting to a changing world. I have tried it. Not sure I want to be part of such world, unfortunately. > the experience is pretty much like being a senior dev with a bunch of very eage…

> I... don't want that. Juniors just slow me down because I have to check what they did and fix their mistakes.

> (this is in the context of professional software development, not making scripts, tinkering etc)

I understand the sentiment. A few months ago they wanted us to move fast and dumped us (originally 2 developers) with 4 new people who have very little real world coding experience. Not fun, and very stressful.

However, keep in mind that in many workplaces, handling junior devs poorly means one of two things:

1. If you have some abstruse domain expertise, and it's OK that only 1-2 people work on it, you'll be relegated to doing that. Sadly, most workplaces don't have such tasks.

2. You'll be fantastic in your output. Your managers will like you. But they will not promote you. After some point, they expect you to be a leverage multiplier - if you can get others to code really well, the overall team productivity will exceed that of any superstar (and no, I don't believe 10x programmers exist in most workplaces).

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#160

Post by sandinmyjoints »

diggan wrote: post #122
CuriouslyC wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this is still the case. There are some open issues around this. I am surprised they have not moved forward more. I find Aider hugely useful, but would like the opportunity to try out MCP with it.
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