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Agentic Coding Recommendations

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Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#191

Post by soulofmischief »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #154
Leynos wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But you are holding it wrong, and experience is the difference in being able to recognize when oft-repeated advice should actually be seriously considered, vs dismissing entire swaths of engineers who are holding it right.

Do you know how tiring it gets to constantly engage with people who complain about agentic workflows without actually having the experience or knowledge to properly evaluate them? These people already have intentionally closed their minds on the subject, but still love to debate it loudly and frequently even though they have little intention of actually considering others' arguments or advice. What could be an educational moment turns into ideological warfare reminiscent of the text editor or operating system wars.

It's beginning to get infuriating, because of the unbridled arrogance typically encountered by naysayers.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#192

Post by geoka9 »

BeetleB wrote: post #157
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 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 lik…

Just wanted to add to your post with my anecdote.

I was at the "script epiphany" stage a few months ago and I got cool Bash scripts (with far more bells and whistles I would normally implement) just by iterating with Claude via its web interface.

Right now I'm at the "Gemini (with Aider) is pretty good for knock-offs of the already existing functionality" stage (in a Go/HTMX codebase).

I'm yet to get to the "wow, that thing can add brand new functionality using code I'm happy with just by clever context management and prompting" stage; but I'm definitely looking forward to it.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#193

Post by linguistbreaker »

fibers wrote: post #131
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.

Why is this? is there just a insanely large codebase of open source projects in Java (the only thing i can think of is the entire Apache suite)? Or is it because the docs are that expressive and detailed for a given OSS library?

Java's API docs are very complete and explicit.

Certain points about the language, as well as certain long-existing open source projects have been discussed ad-nauseum online. This all adds to the body of knowledge.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#194

Post by haiku2077 »

agos wrote: post #85
reedf1 wrote: post #23

I have seen multiple articles pushing for GO as agentic language of choice; does anyone else feel like this is quite forced? I have tried agentic coding in several languages and I didn't have a particularly good or productive experience with GO.

it's especially forced if you are making frontend or mobile apps

Or ML apps, since Go doesn't have native GPU or CUDA support. You can do it via CGO but it's far messier than pure Go.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#195

Post by phito »

BeetleB wrote: post #158
phito wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.wikipe…

Sure, keep slowly offloading more and more of your brain to technology. Until you won't be needed anymore.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#196

Post by namaria »

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…

> "Today is the worst day you will have with this technology for the rest of your life."

Why do we trust corporations to keep making things better all of a sudden?

The most jarring effect of this hype cycle is that all appear to refers to some imaginary set of corporate entities.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#197

Post by namaria »

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…

I really don't get it. I've tested some agents and they can generate boilerplate. It looks quite impressive if you look at the logs, actually seems like an autonomous intelligent agent.

But I can run commands on my local linux box that generate boilerplate in seconds. Why do I need to subscribe to access gpu farms for that? Then the agent gets stuck at some simple bug and goes back and forth saying "yes, I figured out and solved it now" and it keeps changing between two broken states.

The rabid prose, the Fly.io post deriding detractors... To me it seems same hype as usual. Lots of words about it, the first few steps look super impressive, then it gets stuck banging against a wall. If almost all that is said is prognostication and preaching, and we haven't seen teams and organizations racing ahead on top of this new engine of growth... maybe it can't actually carry loads outside of the demo track?

It can be useful. Does it merit 100 billion dollar outlays and datacenter-cum-nuclear-powerplant projects? I hardly think so.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#198

Post by peterbraden »

hucker wrote: post #8
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you recommand to get a Claude-code-like experience in the open-source + local llm ecosystem? There is nothing at the moment that I would recommend. However I'm quite convinced that we will see this soon. First of all I quite like where SST's OpenCode is going. The upcoming UX looks really good. Secondly because having that in place, will make it quite easy to put local models in when they get better. The is…

Have you tried aider, and if so, how is it lacking compared to Claude Code in your opinion?

I have tried both, and aider is far less able when it comes to navigating your codebase, and self driving investigation. You are very involved in context management with aider, whereas claude code can use cli commands to do a lot of things itself.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#199

Post by bubblyworld »

ajdidbdbsgs wrote: post #103
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…

> 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).

For me comments are for discussions, not essays - from my perspective you went straight into snark about the parent's coding abilities, which kinda kills any hope of a conversation.
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