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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?

#51
post #27

YES! It's still very wip, I spent a couple of weekends on it so far, but I'm working on a harness that eschews autonomy and instead aims to work as a pair programming partner. Key to that are distinct "driver" and "navigator" modes, with the capacity to flip between them rapidly. https://gitlab.com/philbooth/opair (not really usable yet, but after tomorrow's session I expect to be developing opair in opair, which is…

Love this idea and will be following closely! I've wanted a pair programmer style interaction for a while now. Something closer to VSCode's Copilot inline conversations and FIM, but where it's continuously watching what I'm doing and ruminating on suggestions.

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

#52

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 contr…

This sounds a bit like Ruby on Rails including Hotwire? Even has the “on-rails development” in the name, schema design in a config, migrations, etc. Though some frontend decisions are a bit more open

Rails takes this approach[1] to some extent, but it's still possible to plug in different things, it's still all flexible enough to build any type of web app pretty much, and it still requires a ton of developer (or LLM) involvement.

I'm thinking of going far further, to the point that perhaps we should use a new language designed only for web-app development. I'm thinking about removing almost all options so that the LLM only gets to write custom business logic and data modelling and doesn't need to do much else. Again this is all at the cost of being more generally applicable, but I see a lot of software that is fundamentally CRUDL and it's still hard to build well, and I also see a lot of LLMs reinventing the wheel but implementing too many sides on that wheel. They need guardrails.

[1]: https://dhh.dk/2012/rails-is-omakase.html

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

#53

I'm building "workboxes" to work on my startup. It helps me develop features insanely fast. A workbox is a simple worktree-in-a-sandbox per feature. I have a simple front end where I can launch new workboxes: I input a prompt (a documented grilling session) and it creates a branch, a PR, and starts an opencode coding session on an e2b sandbox based on a custom template with the app's monorepo. Each workbox has a publ…

Is it similar to how Claude Code Web works? It generates a cloud container and clones your repo, and works on a whatever you want (preferebly something specific), and then it generates a branch and a PR.

I guess. I never worked with Claude Code Web, but it sounds like it serves the same purpose.

The challenge I dealt with is actually running all services on the same machine - 4 services, each needs their own port, 2 of them need docker. Then injecting their sandbox urls into env vars for communication. All to have a fully working app with all services running - I just go to the public web app url and test.

Nonetheless, I'll look into CC Web, thanks for the mention.

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

#55
I have also noticed that, waiting for an LLM answer makes my mind wander to completely unrelated topics.

What I've found useful is to create a tasks.md file where each bullet point / task is one implementation. Bullet points that belong together and can be done in the same chat session are grouped together.

I easily enter a flow state during writing these detailed implementation plans. Then I can also start multiple chat sessions for parts that don't interfere with each other, while I'm waiting for an LLM answer for one part I can get started on the next or start reviewing one of the previous answers.

I have also explored more complex, e.g. using Kanban board for tasks, but I found great value in these simple yet effective setups.

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

#56
I built a terminal that is also an agent comms system. Way back when Claude Code first came out I hacked together something to get two of them talking to each other and inserting text and reading from each others respective TTYs, and it was horribly hacky, so I set about actually understanding how CLIs, TUIs, and terminals work (I had written a simplified terminal based on jquery-terminal a long while ago during Covid that hacked tool runs using GPT-2, so this was overdue). I've been writing code for decades, so have all of it handy in case I need to point the LLMs to a particular way of doing things. Refactoring constantly is key.

There's cmux in this space, but I had already used Hyper for years, so I decided it was time to fork something and build on it. Cmux does tabs in panes AND panes in tabs. Hyperia does addressable panes in tabs and windows. I've tried to keep it minimalistic, which helps with flowing back and forth between different projects (I typically work on 3-4 at a time). I added a Rust sidecar, making all objects addressable over MCP, so Claude Code, Codex, or a small local model on Ollama can split panes, run commands, and read screens, with one hard rule enforced in the harness rather than the prompt: an agent can never move my focus, other than asking for permissions to access a new object. ACLs too. Hyperia also carries an agent loop that wires into it's own MCP server, so a local model in a Javascript "shell" can control resizing the terminal (handy for videos), or opening a project and setting up the agent panes.

I stay typing in a pane while the agents work in theirs, in my peripheral vision, and web panes sit right next to terminals so docs, webapps/sites and the agent chat live in the same window. Reviewing becomes glancing instead of context switching, which is the closest thing to ideal flow with prompts I've gotten out of this auto-AI stuff. Tab and pane clicks copy the address into the buffer, then I paste and issue commands referencing what I want dealt with. I have an SDR radio on my box that allows me to talk to a given pane (WIP not in the build yet). Working on getting the local agent stuff done and wired to the radio.

The upshot of this approach is enabling agents running in one tab, all mounting the same directory, with one in charge of the others. Claude Code is great at this, and it saves on the tokens it would normally use for doing it itself. I talk to Claude, or whatever I pick, and it talks to the rest of the agents and coordinates the work. I like Antigravity a lot because it moves crazy fast for coding. With Claude in control and GLM-5.2 doing auditing and explaining to me how development is going. As an example. No unseeable agent army here. No need for it, actually.

About the only thing that trips me up at the moment is having to work on Hyperia itself, which I don't do inside of it because of restarts. When I work on Hyperia, I start an agent in Windows terminal and wire it into the MCP for testing. I build installers constantly as well, and then run through the Q&A process by using it to work on other projects I'm doing.

I use Zed for code editing and viewing, but rarely. I also just open things in special sticky notes (or have the agent do it) so I understand how we're doing things. GLM-5.2 took to the planning stickys like a fish in water.

https://github.com/deepbluedynamics/hyperia

https://github.com/deepbluedynamics/nemesis8 (n8)

Both are open source, obviously. It's worth mentioning they will remain that way and will never require a service plan or any other cost. I built them because I needed it for another project I will be selling, not aimed at developers at all.

n8 implements the agent runs in containers. This is a separation of concerns - in runs in any terminal and controls the session starts and search for previous sessions (as well as monitoring the usage of tokens, CPU, network and file access). Working on the dashboard for that now, so I can easily see which files are changing, how much they changed, and what changed in them. I co-founded Loggly, so that crap is in my wheelhouse.

This isn't the tab completion model. It works great for the way my brain works, but I also think having an agentic terminal is a good move for anyone writing code and we'd all be better off if we ran agents in containers over our bare metal. It makes it way easier to see what the agent is doing (and resuming later), and allows it to do most of its work in the container, as opposed to running loose on my box..

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

#58
The tab model was a lot of fun, you felt like you're getting a speed boost while coding. I think vibe coding (or agentic engineering) is a different paradigm altogether.

I have tried out some of the popular tools and I'm using opencode on desktop and I use pi via termux on android for when I'm on the go. I think the current direction of PRD -> review -> execute -> debug is in many cases the right mindset.

Working with a team of fresh graduates, I see that working with any vibe coding tool is like being a manager, not a developer. I think that's what you miss, you miss being a developer but the vibe coding tools make you a manager which isn't something that you might enjoy.

Nonetheless, I do think that there are some interesting things to do with pi. I'm just getting started, if anyone has an interesting workflow in pi, I would be interested in trying it out!

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

#59
post #58

The tab model was a lot of fun, you felt like you're getting a speed boost while coding. I think vibe coding (or agentic engineering) is a different paradigm altogether. I have tried out some of the popular tools and I'm using opencode on desktop and I use pi via termux on android for when I'm on the go. I think the current direction of PRD -> review -> execute -> debug is in many cases the right mindset. Working wit…

Nice insight. I never understood this “accept being a manager” thing, because in reality, that’s not the case. Being a manager is much more complex than handling code generated by agents.

What still puzzles me a lot is how you can accept that AI just writes the code for you, without you being the one making decisions about how the code — not the spec — will be written. How are you able to get things done while still keeping a good understanding of everything you did?

Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe it’s because I haven’t pushed the agentic way to its limits, but I really haven’t found it to be a good way to produce good work in general.

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

#60

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 contr…

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