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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?

#121

Post by redmattred »

Venkatesh Rao had this idea about matching the type of work you choose at a given time to the mood state you are currently in (or finding cues to shift yourself into the mood state that best matches the kind of work you need to be doing).

Pick a few personas to develop that match different aspects of your personality and map to different mood states you might be in. Not so much defining roles, but different work styles that you work in. Write prompts for each of them.

Keep a task list your agent has access to. Feed it your personas as well.

Have an agent pick one task and to frame the work through the lens of each of your personas and to ask it to ask you to choose which one you would like to pick.

Schedule it to run each morning and trust your gut with whichever one you pick.

You have now put yourself on the opposite end of the prompt response loop and the agent is prompting you for a response.

You'll be in a flow state in no time.

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

#123

Post by fractorial »

aleqs wrote: post #85

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…

I rolled my own simple execution DAG program.

It’s shockingly effective due to rooting sub-DAGs into Planner nodes which are the only mutators of the DAG. The deepest topological leaf nodes become the blockers to the next Planner node.

The only other special node is a Human node; structurally impossible for agents to close (I rolled my own harness) and block on my attention.

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

#124

Post by strapchay »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #108
leetrout wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a thing sorta like this between app and infra. My app agent sends messages to the infra agent for what it needs and they go back and forth to sort things out. They invented their own working process on top of it and wrote their own tool. It's interesting watching all this work. Feels like the future more than a lot of things I've seen in the past few years. Shame we're doing this to the detriment of the environ…

That's sort of crazy. My agents are completely locked down and their communication channels are limited. For example, a QA agent can give feedback to the coder or tester agents, but it can't reveal information to them that they shouldn't know about. It also prevents them from going off the rails, since they can't really do anything outside of their specified tasks (tools are locked down as well).

Have a look at GitHub.com/Strapchay/protag. I have a similar concept implemented. It’s still a work in progress and I haven’t worked on it for a while but the context is that they can only make modification through a cli tool created for the project which also restricts the context of the files they can look through and each domain agent is assigned specific files and can’t modify beyond it. Still a lot of work to be done though

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

#125

Post by fellerts »

vitally3643 wrote: post #116

I, like many nerds of the same stripe, have a dragon's hoard of every PC component I've owned in the last 20 years. I've attached as much of it to my homelab as is practical, but there's still a pile of GPUs from the last decade plus. So I decided to load up everything with more then 3GB of VRAM into various machines on the network. Anything that could conceivably run an LLM of any utility. I've been experimenting wi…

This sounds cool, do you have a more detailed write-up?

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

#126

Post by sublinear »

I assume you're not talking about solo work. For me, the quickest way to "flow state" has always started with human discussion. Only then does writing the code become a trivial task I can do alone. LLMs will never provide the flow because they do not set the goals. The tail does not wag the dog. They can only suggest implementation details.

Unless I'm working on totally unfamiliar problems, I don't want that advice for the majority of the code. Contrary to popular belief, there exist so many situations where there's exactly one right answer and countless wrong ones. There are less important miscellaneous parts I might have it fill in.

The only reason I cannot completely delegate to AI is because it cannot read my mind. Even then, it would probably still suggest crap since it is the averaging of those countless wrong answers. And still, even if it could overcome all that, I'm only saving a few hours at the end of several days of meetings.

I'm just not getting where the value is for anyone beyond entry level. I'm being totally honest when I say that I even stopped needing most search and documentation (for mature tools) over a decade ago. Back then, Stack Overflow was at its peak and I had the same questions about it. Offline coding is not only possible, but increasingly easier.

What am I doing different here?

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

#127

Post by strapchay »

satvikpendem wrote: post #119

As Boris said, you shouldn't be manually prompting anymore but asking the AI to prompt itself, in the form of workflows. I usually have 3 to 5 different sessions running at once all autonomously.

Funny but how do you then maintain orientation context? Except you’ve set strict parameters which then gets feed into the loop and which it uses to make decisions?

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

#128

Post by vitally3643 »

fellerts wrote: post #125
vitally3643 wrote: post #116

I, like many nerds of the same stripe, have a dragon's hoard of every PC component I've owned in the last 20 years. I've attached as much of it to my homelab as is practical, but there's still a pile of GPUs from the last decade plus. So I decided to load up everything with more then 3GB of VRAM into various machines on the network. Anything that could conceivably run an LLM of any utility. I've been experimenting wi…

This sounds cool, do you have a more detailed write-up?

Nope, honestly it's about three weekends worth of vibe coded python slop. Far, far below my personal standards for publication. Maybe one day when I get a useful result I'll publish a blog.

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

#129

Post by aleqs »

worik wrote: post #96
aleqs wrote: post #85

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…

> The main bottleneck at this point is the cost of all of the token Are you using Chinese models? Quite a bit cheaper, but maybe still too expensive?

Yeah mainly deepseek, it performs near top pretty consistently in terms of price/output (with a basic quality measure). I would love to test with more models but that's not cost-realistic for me at the moment.

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

#130

Post by avilay »

thinkingemote wrote: post #21
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…

I'd be interested in the rabbit hole of flow state. Also with regards to the dopamine rewards of solving a bug as motivation. Sometimes using a LLM can assist these and sometimes it can feel like cheating myself out of a good thing and I'm not entirely sure where the borders are. It could also be related to a sense of ownership or pride in ones work and seeing the value in doing quality work.

Debugging can be super fun as we eliminate possibilities and it feels like we are converging to a solution. There have been instances where Claude (Opus family) was not able to effectively debug and I had to step in and do it. But debugging an over-engineered library for example, can become very wearisome. This is when I am really thankful for having Claude Code, it is able to figure out the bug and its fix/workaround pretty fast. I can then get back to doing my main task instead of spending an indefinite amount of time stepping through sloppily written code.
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