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Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#31

Post by magicmadrid00 »

Well, it always depends on your environment. In my case, nothing forces me to heavily use AI, so my workflow is kind of the old way, but with less hassle.

- Do your thinking alone. (AI part: search, understanding)

- Specing. (AI part: search, understanding, completing some text)

- Coding like the old days. (AI part: search, understanding, code examples)

- Okay, now I have a good idea of how my feature is going to work

- Look for fluff code and delegate it to AI to write/review it.

- Focus on the part of the code I want to have fun doing.

- Review.

- Repeat.

It’s slower than the approach of doing specs and letting AI do the rest, while focusing your role only on code review. However, I’m more in control of what I build, I can explain what I built better than everyone else, and I build up my knowledge. (also I have less problems, because less code haha)

Will I go for the full Agentic way ? Maybe but I will find a way to slow it down so I can be in control

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#32

Post by danpalmer »

Something I'm thinking about and doing a bit of experimentation with is using LLMs to write specialist higher level code.

Rather than ask them to write web-apps in webby languages with open source frameworks etc, providing a very fixed, on-rails development process where everything is abstracted away. Accept that it'll be less powerful, but take the trade-off that it'll hopefully be faster and produce much more controllable software.

Concrete example, why do we let the LLM choose a database, schema, migration procedure, library, etc. We could decide to only support one database, enforce schema design (such as every table containing access control), enforce a migration process, enforce a library, even do schema design in a fixed config file rather than arbitrary DDL. Same for auth, deployments, even UI.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#33

Post by yehiaabdelm »

Just want to add:

I'm trying to do the same amount of work faster, not do work in parallel or agent orchestration. I'm not against letting the model go off and do things on it's own, that has its time and place.

But if I can do something in 15 minutes instead of 1 hour without the annoying prompt response loop, without the feeling that there could be blind spots, and while keeping all of the context (or at least most) in my head. That's a bigger win than spinning up 5 agents to do different things.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#34

Post by neepoPhantom »

The fundamental problem i keep seeing across all harnesses is the use of the exact same UX afforded by a git based backend. If we want to stay in flow, the LLMs edit backend would have to be based off something like crdts to handle simultaneous edits.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#35

Post by sixothree »

chilmers wrote: post #15

I don't think you would expect to get into a flow state if you were intermittently directing another (human) programmer to do work, and you shouldn't expect to with LLM-driven coding either. Perhaps you are best finding out ways to extend the length of time where the LLM can work without prompting, then use that downtime to focus on other tasks that will help you to guide it better the next time you need to prompt it…

I feel the opposite. Creating a DTO or wiring up a CQRS command takes me out of the flow. And while I enjoy a good refactoring, it would be nice if I could just have it refactor code in the background while I'm still working in the same file.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#36

Post by Incipient »

My current approach which I've been testing on two MVPs with what I would call 'moderate success' (but hey, actual success!)

3 tier, philosophy-spec-design. Increasing detail. Design files include db model explanations and pseudocode/function headers - that level of detail.

For each thing I need to change, I have a, prompt ready to go to ask the agent to follow about 5 steps and it outputs a 'reviewfile' with details of what it things about the thing I posited. I review its output. I have another prompt ready to then get an agent to generate a taskfile + update the design documentation. The taskfile explains in great detail what has changed and what needs to be implemented. I review the taskfile and got diffs of the design doc changes. Finally an agent implements the taskfile. I review all changed code and commit.

It gets there, but still definitely misses some stuff. It's very adequate for a MVP I'm finding.

Edit: this seems to only work with Opus. Sonnet can't do it (maybe I'm just lucky and Opus is seriously compensating for an awful approach and I'm just lucky?)

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#37

Post by pjbeam »

I'm in the middle of it so don't have any conclusions for you, but I started mucking with building my own cli coding app and there are _tons_ of levers available that aren't apparent from claude code or codex.

Including altering the turn concept. I think it is still ultimately call and response but instead of everything is a quarter note you can get a little closer to a beat you like.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#38

Post by avilay »

avilay wrote: post #13

Not being able to enter flow state is a very interesting observation. I've felt it too to the extent that I went down a whole new rabbit hole of what it means to be in flow state. Let me know if anybody here wants to know more, happy to post some links. To answer your question - I discuss the approach with Claude Code (e.g., should I implement my own ACT model in JAX or PyTorch, Python or Rust or Julia, etc.). Then w…

Ok here are the flow related links. This was about 1.5 years ago when I was trying to figure out burnout and it turned out flow (or lack thereof) was closely related.

  * https://youtu.be/VbUFMYs0kXQ?si=xiNw4ZFlla8k-p7w  The person who gives this talk (Rian Doris) has a good newsletter that I still read. I just checked their website and it has gone in full commercial mode, so YMMV.

  * https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_your_elusive_creative_genius

  * https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465074871

  * https://www.betterup.com/blog/meaning-of-personal-values
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