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

i would investigate how claude code and codex work and suggest to build your own. it is not as hard to do as it seems (its not easy still, the prompting specifically). it can show u how workflows, skills, memory, plans etc. work so you can experiment for yourself to implement the workflow that suits _you_.

its an interesting excersize, for me i started with a simple repl to call models through model adapters, then allow them to list directories and read files within a chroot, build up slowly to also write access to files, then look at whats out there and try to build stuff you like from it.

the prompts are hard and there are some weird issues u will hit that will also help u understand certain fundamental limits etc. - understanding those can help also understand why some things dont work as hoped just yet.

for example, i had a real headache trying to make interactive specialized identities within workflows, so each stage is handled by specialized identites which have specific tools and focused context etc. theres a lot of hallucination too so u gotta have a lot more model cals, maybe do consensus between models etc. adversarial identities to review outputs before applying etc. All the stuff you still end up doing yourself again despite having programmed / prompted it all in...

initially it was all one context and identities struggled to remember what part of the process they would do, what tools they had vs what tool outputs to expect from previous stages etc. (it was funny but a big mess)

i use codex now, its closest to what i want, i couldnt get it better myself. claude wants to do too much and 'complete' stuff to much for me..

there are people blogging about loop programming, i did not investigate it thoroughly yet but id expect for myself id have similar results as my previous endevour.

edit: wanted to add, my motivation as claude dumps a lot of text back, i was using it back then. i wanted to give my models part of the screen as 'surface' to pin images, charts, and text etc on there, this worked nicely but i could not get them to do it really organically (prompting issues).

i thought i would be cool if the model could be like hey human, this thing we keep on screen while we discuss / design, like an architecture diagram. went to vulkan / glfw3 and rendering a terminal in there to get good enough pixel accurate graphics for presentation, that worked well and claude built it really easily.

I miss feeling like I was "in the zone", but I haven't been able to achieve it in years.

Between having kids and a work situation a few years back, it is like my brain expects to be interrupted at any moment, so won't get there.

I'm working an an agentic graph-based workflow execution engine/framework. The concept of the harness is completely abstracted away/generified - a 'node/agent's is a harness (cc, codex, open code, pi, etc) + model (I test different model and harness combinations). I have a set of tasks from trivial to complex - a set workflows (a workflow is a set of initial nodes and their behaviour) is defined and each one is asked to perform each task (multiplied by each harness/model combination roughly). The workflow can include agents/nodes which are able to modify the workflow graph and create nodes. Other nodes can break down tasks and send subtasks to other nodes. Mostly experimental stage at this point. I'm exploring/tracking metrics such as total wall clock time to complete a task, total cost in tokens and $, among others. This gives me a decent amount of data/insight into the abilities/performance of different harness/agents/models for different tasks, and gives me a great testing/dogfooding of my own harness (which is one of the harnesses being tested, and as of now the most efficient one).

The main bottleneck at this point is the cost of all of the tokens in the fairly large test matrix of tasks, harnesses, models.

I hope to release/open source all of this stuff eventually.

I recently started an internship in a field I am very interested in. I began using claude to write a lot of my code, but realized that:

a) It was way too easy to just auto-approve everything. Answering the 5-10 spec questions it asked me made me feel like I was an important part of the loop, but really it was just a way to make me feel important while spraying my slop cannon.

b) I wasn't actually learning anything, defeating the whole purpose of the internship I worked hard to get.

I am now using a workflow where the brainstorming process is the same, but I have claude write an instructional document for me to implement. It has instructions to ask me questions about what I know / want to know, to lay out the plan iteratively with lots of verification steps, and to heavily explain portions of the code that are unfamiliar to me. It's sorta like making my own custom tutorials specifically for the problem I am working on.

It's a little slower, but not too bad since it does still put whole codeblocks in the instructions. I have a much better understanding of what I am doing, I still get to enjoy learning and programming and improving, and I don't feel like a reverse centaur.

I think trying to iterate on a "spectral decomposition of your intent" - slowly working on increasinly refined breakdowns of what are the different aspects of your project are - both on the domain- and also the technical level; aka requirements and architecture. And then don't directly iterate on the code but rather regenerate/update the codebase based on the new intent and the old codebase... And a decomposition of the whole thing in terms of optics (open lenses, etc) where the decomposition respects the "spectral decomposition".