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Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update
11–20 of 434 posts
Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update
#12My question on all of the “can’t work with big codebases” is how would a codebase that was designed for an LLM look like? Composed of many many small functions that can be composed together?
like a microservice architecture? overall architecture to get the context and then dive into a micro one?
Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update
#13I'm going a little offtopic here, but I disagree with the OPs use of the term "PhD-level knowledge", although I have a huge amount of respect for antirez (beside that we are born in the same island). This phrasing can be misleading and points to a broader misunderstanding about the nature of doctoral studies, which it has been influenced by the marketing and hype discourse surrounding AI labs. The assertion that ther…
Agree with that. Read it as expert-level knowledge without all the other stuff LLMs can’t do as well as humans. LLMs way to express knowledge is kinda of alien as it is different, so indeed those are all poor simplifications. For instance an LLM can’t code as well as a top human coder but can write a non trivial program from the first to the last character without iterating.
Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update
#14This matches my take, but I'm curious if OP has used Claude code.
Yep when I use agents I go for Claude Code. For example I needed to buy too many Commodore 64 than appropriate lately, and I let it code a Telegram bot advising me when popular sources would have interesting listings. It worked (after a few iterations) then I looked at the code base and wanted to puke but who cares in this case? It worked and it was much faster and I had zero to learn in the proces of doing it myself…
For example I needed to buy too many Commodore 64 than appropriate lately
Been there, done that!
for those one-off small things, LLMs are rather cool. Especially Cloude Code and Gemini CLI. I was given an archive of some really old movies recently, but files were bearing title names in Croatian instead of original (mostly English ones). So I claude --dangerously-skip-permissions into the directory with movies and in a two-sentence prompt I asked it to rename files into a given format (that I tend to have in my archive) and for each title to find original name and year or release and use it in the file.. but, before commiting rename to give me a list of before and after for approval. It took like what, a minute of writing a prompt.
Now, for larger things, I'm still exploring a way, an angle, what and how to do it. I've tried from yolo prompting to structured and uber structured approaches, all the way to mimicking product/prd - architecture - project management / tasks - developer/agents.. so far, unless it's rather simpler projects I don't see it's happening that way. Most luck I had was "some structure" as context and inputs and then guiding prompting during sessions and reviewing stuff. Almost pair-programming.
Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update
#15Unlike OP, from my still limited but intense month or so diving into this topic so far, I had better luck with Gemini 2.5 PRO and Opus 4 on more abstract level like architecture etc. and then dealing input to Sonnet for coding. I found 2.5 PRO, and to a lesser degree Opus, were hit or miss; A lot of instances of them circling around the issue and correcting itself when coding (Gemini especially so), whereas Sonnet would cut to the chase, but needed explicit take on it to be efficient.
Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update
#16Translation: His company will launch "AI" products in order to get funding or better compete with Valkey.
I find it very sad that people who have been really productive without "AI" now go out of their way to find small anecdotal evidence for "AI".
Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update
#17“Always be part of the loop by moving code by hand from your terminal to the LLM web interface: this guarantees that you follow every process. You are still the coder, but augmented.”
I agree with this, but this is why I use a CLI. You can pipe files instead of copying and pasting.
Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update
#18My question on all of the “can’t work with big codebases” is how would a codebase that was designed for an LLM look like? Composed of many many small functions that can be composed together?
I believe it’s the same as for humans: different files implementing different parts of the system with good interfaces and sensible boundaries.
this is a common pattern I see -- if your codebase is confusing for LLMs, it's probably confusing for people too
Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update
#19> Coding activities should be performed mostly with: Claude Opus 4 I've been going down to sonnet for coding over opus. maybe i am just writing dumb code
That is also what Anthropic recommends. In edge cases use Opus.
Opus is also way more expensive. (Don’t forget to switch back to Sonnet in all terminals)
Re: Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update
#20Since I’ve heard Gemini-cli is not yet up to snuff, has anyone tried opencode+gemini? I’ve heard that with opencode you can login with Google account (have NOT confirmed this, but if anyone has any experience, pls advise) so not sure if that would get extra mileage from Gemini’s limits vs using a Gemini api key?