Live data from Hacker News

How I write software with LLMs

stavros.io

181–190 of 544 posts

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#181
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you have to count defects

You have to do that anyway, and in fact you probably were already doing that. If you do not track this then you are leaving a lot on the table.

I was more thinking in terms of creating a benchmark which would optimized during training. For regular projects, I agree, you have to count that anyway

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#182
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is easier to be polite always and not switch between polite and non-polite mode depending on who you are talking to.

I believe it's less about politeness and more about pronouns. You used `who`, whereas I would use `what` in that sentence. In my world view, a LLM is far closer to a fridge than the androids of the movies, let alone human beings. So it's about as pointless being polite to it as is greeting your fridge when you walk into the kitchen. But I know that others feel different, treating the ability to generate coherent resp…

I'd say it's more related to getting dressed for work even if you're remote and have no video calls

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#183

> One thing I’ve noticed is that different people get wildly different results with LLMs, so I suspect there’s some element of how you’re talking to them that affects the results. It's always easier to blame the prompt and convince yourself that you have some sort of talent in how you talk to LLMs that other's don't. In my experience the differences are mostly in how the code produced by the LLM is reviewed. Develope…

I thought I try to debunk your argument with a food example. I am not sure I succeeded though. Judge for yourself:

It's always easier to blame the ingredients and convince yourself that you have some sort of talent in how you cook that others don't.

In my experience the differences are mostly in how the dishes produced in the kitchen are tasted. Chefs who have experience tasting dishes critically are more likely to find problems immediately and complain they aren't getting great results without a lot of careful adjustments. And those who rarely or never tasted food from other cooks are invariably going to miss stuff and rate the dishes they get higher.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#184
post #167
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you’re probably looking for someone who uses cursor etc to answer but here’s a data point from someone a bit off the beaten path. My editor supports both modes (emacs). I have the editor integration features (diff support etc) turned off and just use emacs to manage 5+ shells that each have a CLI agent (one of Claude, opencode, amp free) running in them. If I want to go deep into a prompt then I’ll write a ma…

I noticed that OpenCode requires per their own website "a modern terminal emulator" - so, no problem in Emacs? Are you running M-x term?

I have my own function that starts up a vterm in the root of the repo that I’m in. It is average for running Claude (long sessions get the scrolling through the whole history on every output character bug) but actually better at running opencode which doesn’t have this problem.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#185

Genuine question: what's the evidence that the architect → developer → reviewer pipeline actually produces better results than just... talking to one strong model in one session? The author uses different models for each role, which I get. But I run production agents on Opus daily and in my experience, if you give it good context and clear direction in a single conversation, the output is already solid. The ceremony…

It's not about splitting for quality, it's about cost optimisation (Sonnet implements, which is cheaper). The quality comes with the reviewers.

Notice that I didn't split out any roles that use the same model, as I don't think it makes sense to use new roles just to use roles.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#186
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is easier to be polite always and not switch between polite and non-polite mode depending on who you are talking to.

I get what you're saying, but I'm not talking about swearing at the model or anything, I'm only implying that investing energy in formulating a syntactically nice sentence doesn't or shouldn't bring any value, and that I don't care if I hurt the model's feelings (it doesn't have any). Note, why would the author write "Email will arrive from a webhook, yes." instead of "yy webhook"? In the second case I wouldn't be im…

[dead]

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#187
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, please, please don’t make this mistake. It is not a therapist. At best, it might be a facsimile of a life coach, but it does not have your best interests in mind. It is easy to convince and trivial to make obsequious. That is not what a therapist does. There’s a reason they spend thousands of hours in training; that is not an exaggeration. Humans are complex. An LLM cannot parse that level of complexity.

You seem to think therapists are only for those in dire straits. Yes, if you're at that point, definitely speak to a human. But there are many ordinary things for which "drop-in" therapist advice is also useful. For me: mild road rage, social anxiety, processing embarrassment from past events, etc. The tools and reframing that LLMs have given me (Gemini 3.0/3.1 Pro) have been extremely effective and have genuinely im…

[dead]

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#188
post #183

> One thing I’ve noticed is that different people get wildly different results with LLMs, so I suspect there’s some element of how you’re talking to them that affects the results. It's always easier to blame the prompt and convince yourself that you have some sort of talent in how you talk to LLMs that other's don't. In my experience the differences are mostly in how the code produced by the LLM is reviewed. Develope…

I thought I try to debunk your argument with a food example. I am not sure I succeeded though. Judge for yourself: It's always easier to blame the ingredients and convince yourself that you have some sort of talent in how you cook that others don't. In my experience the differences are mostly in how the dishes produced in the kitchen are tasted. Chefs who have experience tasting dishes critically are more likely to f…

In your example the one making the food is you. You would have to introduce a cooking robot for the analogy to match agentic coding.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#189
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not skill with talking to an LLM, it's the users skill and experience with the problem they're asking the LLM to solve. They work better for problems the prompter knows well and poorly for problems the prompter doesn't really understand. Try it yourself. Ask claude for something you don't really understand. Then learn that thing, get a fresh instance of claude and try again, this time it will work much better be…

Not only you understanding the how, but you not understanding the goal. I often use AI successfully, but in a few cases I had, it was bad. That was when I didn't even know the end goal and regularly switched the fundamental assumptions that the LLM tried to build up. One case was a simulation where I wanted to see some specific property in the convergence behavior, but I had no idea how it would get there in the dyna…

Yup, same sort of experience. If I'm fishing for something based on vibes that I can't really visualize or explain, it's going to be a slog. That said, telling the LLM the nature of my dilemma up front, warning it that I'll be waffling, seems to help a little.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#190

> One thing I’ve noticed is that different people get wildly different results with LLMs, so I suspect there’s some element of how you’re talking to them that affects the results. It's always easier to blame the prompt and convince yourself that you have some sort of talent in how you talk to LLMs that other's don't. In my experience the differences are mostly in how the code produced by the LLM is reviewed. Develope…

In my experience the differences are mostly between the chair and the keyboard.

I asked Codex to scrape a bunch of restaurant guides I like, and make me an iPhone app which shows those restaurants on a map color coded based on if they're open, closed or closing/opening soon.

I'd never built an iOS app before, but it took me less than 10 minutes of screen time to get this pushed onto my phone.

The app works, does exactly what I want it to do and meaningfully improves my life on a daily basis.

The "AI can't build anything useful" crowd consists entirely of fools and liars.

Post reply on HN