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Agentic Coding Recommendations

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101–110 of 210 posts

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#101
post #33

I've been trying Claude Code with Sonnet 4.0 for a week or so now for Rust code but it feels really underwhelming (and expensive since it's via Bedrock right now). Everytime it's doing something it's missing half despite spending a lot of time planning at the beginning of the session. What am I missing?

Same. I have a very efficient workflow with Cursor Edit/Agent mode where it pretty much one-shots every change or feature I ask it to make. Working inside a CLI is painful, are people just letting Claude Code churn for 10-15 minutes and then reviewing the diff? Are people even reviewing the code?

> Are people even reviewing the code?

No because its boring. Thats why we don't have airplane pilots just watch the machine thats fully on autopilot.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#103

I stumbled into Agentic Coding in VS Code Nightlys with co-pilot using Claude Sonnet 4 and I've been silly productive. Even when half my day is meetings, you wouldn't be able to tell from my git history. My thinking now is removed from the gory details and is a step or two up. How can I validate the changes are working? Can I understand this code? How should it be structured so I can better understand it? Is there mo…

> Last night I had a file with 38 mypy errors

Fixing type checker errors should be one the least time consuming things you do. This was previously consuming a lot of your time?

A lot of the AI discourse would be more effective if we could all see the actual work one another is doing with it (similar to the cloudflare post).

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#104
> Context system: Go provides a capable copy-on-write data bag that explicitly flows through the code execution path, similar to contextvars in Python or .NET's execution context. Its explicit nature greatly simplifies things for AI agents. If the agent needs to pass stuff to any call site, it knows how to do it.

I believe this is considered a bad practice: the general attitude is that the only sane use case for values in context.Context is tracing data, and all other data should he explicitly passed via arguments.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#105
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a good part of yesterday attempting to use ChatGPT to help me choose an appropriate API gateway. Over and over it suggested things that literally do not exist, and the only reason I could tell was that I spent a good amount of time in the actual documentation. This has been my experience roughly 80% of the time when trying to use an LLM. I would like to know what is the magical prompt engineering technique th…

I'm having a very good experience with ChatGPT at the moment. I'm mostly using it for little tasks where I don't remember the exact library functions. Examples: "C++ question: how do I get the unqualified local system time and turn into an ISO time string?" "Python question: how do I serialize a C struct over a TCP socket with asyncio?" "JS question: how do I dynamically show/hide an HTML element?" (I obviously don't…

The problem with this approach is that you might lose important context which is present in the documentation but doesn’t surface through the LLM. As an example, I just asked GPT-4o how to access Nth character in a string in Go. Predictably, it answered str[n]. This is a wildly dangerous suggestion because it works correctly for ASCII but not for other UTF8 characters. Sure, if you know about this and prompt it further it tells you about this limitation, but that’s not what 99% of people will do.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#106
On the note of language choice, i've been experimenting with Claude Code recently and thought the other day how happy i am to be using Rust with it and how afraid i'd be in Python, JS, etc.

I've noticed Claude Code introduces quite a few errors and then walks through the compile errors to fix things up. Refactors/etc also become quite easy with this workflow from CC.

I'm sure it does well in dynamic languages, but given how much the LLM leans into these compile errors i get the feeling it would simply miss more things if there was none/less.

So far though my #1 concern is finding ways to constraining the LLM. It produces slop really, really quick and when it works more slowly i can avoid some of the review process. Eg i find stubbing out methods and defining the code path i want, in code, rather than trying to explain it to the LLM to be productive.

Still in my infancy of learning this tool though. It feels powerful, but also terrifying in hands of lazy folks just pushing through slop.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#107

> Context system: Go provides a capable copy-on-write data bag that explicitly flows through the code execution path, similar to contextvars in Python or .NET's execution context. Its explicit nature greatly simplifies things for AI agents. If the agent needs to pass stuff to any call site, it knows how to do it. I believe this is considered a bad practice: the general attitude is that the only sane use case for valu…

I'm really not an expect in Go, but the data that I'm passing at the moment via context is the type of data which is commonly placed there by libraries I use: database connections, config, rate limiters, cache backends etc. Does not seem particularly bad to me at least.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#108
post #38
post #16

So using agents forces (or at least nudges) you to use go and tailwind, because they are simple enough (and abundant in the training data) for the AI to use correctly. Does this mean that eventually in a world where we all use this stuff, no new language/framework/library will ever be able to emerge? Competing with the existing alternatives will be too hard. You won't even be able to ask real humans for help on platf…

I’m wondering whether we may see programming languages that are either unreadable to humans or at least designed towards use by LLMs.

LLM as a frontend to LLVM IR maybe.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#109

Can someone recommended some source for vibe coding eg. how to prompt it properly, what tools to use? Does someone have any experience on anything other than small projects from scratch?

I had the same question because all my experience with this contradicts the hype. I watched Ronacher's demo from yesterday, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQYXZCUvpIc , and this is it, a well-regarded engineer working on a serious open source project. There's no wizard behind the curtain, it's the thing I've been asking the promoters for. And you should make your own judgment, but I'm just not impressed. It seems to…

Thanks for the link.

Given the hype and repercussions of success or failure of what LLMs can hypothetically do, I feel like the only way forward for reasonable understanding of the situation is for people to post live streams of what they're raving about.

Or at the very least source links with version control history.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#110

> Context system: Go provides a capable copy-on-write data bag that explicitly flows through the code execution path, similar to contextvars in Python or .NET's execution context. Its explicit nature greatly simplifies things for AI agents. If the agent needs to pass stuff to any call site, it knows how to do it. I believe this is considered a bad practice: the general attitude is that the only sane use case for valu…

I'm really not an expect in Go, but the data that I'm passing at the moment via context is the type of data which is commonly placed there by libraries I use: database connections, config, rate limiters, cache backends etc. Does not seem particularly bad to me at least.

If you use context.Context for this you give up a lot of type safety and generally make your data passing opaque.

It's totally fine to put multiple values into a different data bag type that has explicit, typed fields. For example, the Echo framework has its own strongly typed and extensible Context interface for request scoped data: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/labstack/echo#Context

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