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How I program with LLMs

crawshaw.io

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141–150 of 342 posts

Re: How I program with LLMs

#141

Post by jmull »

LLM auto-complete is good — it suggests more of what I was going to type, and correctly (or close enough) often enough that it’s useful. Especially in the boilerplate-y languages/code I have to use for $dayjob.

Search has been neutral. For finding little facts it’s been about the same as regular search. When digging in, I want comprehensive, dense, reasonably well-written reference documentation. That’s not exactly wide-spread, but LLMs don’t provide this either.

Chat-driven generates too much buggy/incomplete code to be useful, and the chat interface is seriously clunky.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#142

Post by Ygg2 »

> Search. If I have a question about a complex environment, say “how do I make a button transparent in CSS” I will get a far better answer asking any consumer-based LLM, than I do using an old fashioned web search engine.

I don't think this is about LLMs getting better, but search becoming worse. In no small thanks to LLMs polluting the results. Do search images for terms and count how many are AI generated.

I can say I got better result from Google X years ago vs Google of today.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#143

Post by bsenftner »

antirez wrote: post #120
dewitt wrote: post #52

One interesting bit of context is that the author of this post is a legit world-class software engineer already (though probably too modest to admit it). Former staff engineer at Google and co-founder / CTO of Tailscale. He doesn't need LLMs. That he says LLMs make him more productive at all as a hands-on developer, especially around first drafts on a new idea, means a lot to me personally. His post reminds me of an…

I have also many years of programming experience and find myself strongly "accelerated" by LLMs when writing code. But, if you think at it, it makes sense that many seasoned programmers are using LLMs better. LLMs are a helpful tool, but also a hard-to-use tool, and in general it's fair to think that better programmers can do a better use of some assistant (human or otherwise): better understanding its strengths, ide…

Communication skills are the keys to using LLMs. Think about it: every type of information you want is in them, in fact it is there multiple times, with multiple levels of seriousness in the treatment of the idea. If one is casual in their request, using casual language, then the LLM will reply with a casual reply because that matched your request best. To get a hard, factual answer from those that are experts in a subject, use the formal term, use the expert's language and you'll get back a rely more likely to be correct because it's in the same level of formal treatment as correct answers.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#144

Post by valenterry »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #42

It seems like everything I see about success using LLMs for this kind of work is for greenfield. What about three weeks later when the job changes to maintenance and interation on something that's already working? Are people applying LLMs to that space?

Yeah, it sucks. LLMs are not great with a big context yet. I hope that is being worked on. I need the LLM to read my whole project AND optimally all related slack conversations, the wiki and related libraries.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#145

Post by fastball »

IanCal wrote: post #14
mlepath wrote: post #2

The first rule of programming with LLMs is don't use them for anything you don't know how to do. If you can look at the solution and immediately know what's wrong with it, they are a time saver otherwise... I find chat for search is really helpful (as the article states)

That seems like a wild restriction. You can give them more latitude for things you know how to check . I didn't know how to setup the right gnarly typescript generic type to solve my problem but I could easily verify it's correct.

If you don't understand what the generic is doing, there might be edge-cases you don't appreciate. I think Typescript types are fairly non-essential so it doesn't really matter, but for more important business logic it definitely can make a difference.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#146

Post by kccqzy »

IanCal wrote: post #14
mlepath wrote: post #2

The first rule of programming with LLMs is don't use them for anything you don't know how to do. If you can look at the solution and immediately know what's wrong with it, they are a time saver otherwise... I find chat for search is really helpful (as the article states)

That seems like a wild restriction. You can give them more latitude for things you know how to check . I didn't know how to setup the right gnarly typescript generic type to solve my problem but I could easily verify it's correct.

If you merely know how to check, would you also know how to fix it after you find that it's wrong?

If you are lucky to have the LLM fix it for you, great. If you don't know how to fix it yourself and the LLM doesn't either, you've just wasted a lot of time.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#147

Post by alexvitkov »

knighthack wrote: post #68
dewitt wrote: post #52

One interesting bit of context is that the author of this post is a legit world-class software engineer already (though probably too modest to admit it). Former staff engineer at Google and co-founder / CTO of Tailscale. He doesn't need LLMs. That he says LLMs make him more productive at all as a hands-on developer, especially around first drafts on a new idea, means a lot to me personally. His post reminds me of an…

I knew he was a world-class engineer the moment I saw that his site didn't bother with CSS stylesheets, ads, pictures, or anything beyond a rudimentary layout. The whole article page reads like a site from the '90s, written from scratch in HTML. That's when I knew the article would go hard. Substantive pieces don't need fluffy UIs - the idea takes the stage, not the window dressing.

Glad to know I was a world class engineer at the age of 8, when all I knew were the and tags!

Re: How I program with LLMs

#149

Post by ianpurton »

I've been coding professionally for 30 years.

I'm probably in the same place as the author, using Chat-GPT to create functions etc, then cut and pasting that into VSCode.

I've started using cline which allows me to code using prompts inside VSCode.

i.e. Create a new page so that users can add tasks to a tasks table.

I'm getting mixed results, but it is very promising. I create a clinerules file which gets added to the system prompt so the AI is more aware of my architecture. I'm also looking at overiding the cline system prompt to both make it fit my architecture better and also to remove stuff I don't need.

I jokingly imagine in the future we won't get asked how long a new feature will take, rather, how many tokens will it take.

Re: How I program with LLMs

#150

Post by JKCalhoun »

pplonski86 wrote: post #140
ignoramous wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [David, Former staff engineer at Google ... CTO of Tailscale,] doesn't need LLMs. That he says LLMs make him more productive at all as a hands-on developer, especially around first drafts on a new idea, means a lot to me... Don't doubt for a second the pedigree of founding engs at Tailscale, but David is careful to point out exactly why LLMs work for them (but might not for others): I am doing a particular kind of…

I'm in similar situations, I jump between many environments, mainly between Python and Typescript, however, currently testing a new idea of learning algorithm in C++, and I simply don't always remember all syntax. I was very skeptical about LLMs at first. Now, I'm using LLMs daily. I can focus more on thinking rather than searching stackoverflow. Very often I just need simple function, that it is much faster to creat…

And if anyone remembers: before Stack Overflow you more or less had to specialize in a domain, become good using a handful of frameworks/API, on one platform. Learning a new language, a new API (god forbid a new platform) was to sail, months long, into seas unknown.

In this regard, with first Stack Overflow and now LLMs, the field has improved mightily.

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