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Agentic Coding Recommendations

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Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#161

Post by CuriouslyC »

diggan wrote: post #122
CuriouslyC wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aider is almost there, in fact it's intentionally "not" there. You can set it up to do things like run test/static analysis automatically and fix errors, and work with it to get a to-do list set up so the entire project is spec'd out, then just keep prompting it with "continue...". It has a hard coded reflection limit of 3 iterations right now, but that can also be hacked to whatever you want. The only thing missing…

> The only thing missing for full agentic behavior is built in self prompting behavior. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Aider still doesn't do proper tool calling? Last time I tried it, they did it the "old school" way of parsing out unix shell commands from the output text and ran it once the response finished streaming, instead of the sort of tool call/response stuff we have today.

Yeah, tool/mcp integration isn't great with Aider out of the box.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#162

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

haiku2077 wrote: post #153
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you use context.Context for this you give up a lot of type safety and generally make your data passing opaque. The data passing maybe, not sure how you lose type safety. The value comes from the context with the right type just fine. The stuff that I'm attaching to the context are effectively globals just that this way you can enable proper isolation in tests and else. From my limited experience with echo, the c…

Context.Value's signature is Value(any) any - you have to use type conversion or reflection to determine the value's type at runtime, instead of a compile-time check.

But I have methods such as MustRateLimiterFromContext(ctx) which returns the right type :)

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#163

Post by linsomniac »

bgwalter wrote: post #136
linsomniac wrote: post #133

I had a recent discussion with another member of the Python community (OA is written by a big name in Python). He started off saying "learning to code with AI is like learning to cook by ordering off the menu". I know he meant "an AI being the way you learn how to code", but there's another meaning that I've been thinking a lot about because my 16yo son is really into coding and I'm trying to come up with how I can h…

I think this discussion boxes new students into the mediocre category right from the start. Do we really want to tell Fabrice Bellard that he isn't productive enough? If you want to train people to become fungible factory workers on the other hand, train them to work on the conveyor belt.

I get your point, but I'm envisioning a different endpoint.

Let's take your factory example: Factories are just a fact of life right now, almost nobody is producing bespoke cars or phones or clothing. So given that my son is basically 100% likely to be working with an automation line, how do I get him on the track to being a machine operator or a millwright rather than doing conveyor belt work?

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#164

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

A suggestion that maybe the dark mode shouldn't be on the end of the page and maybe on the top of the page, I personally would've loved it and do it with some of my html blogs, maybe personal preference but yeah I think I agree golang is pretty cool but the knowledge base of python feels more and I sometimes just use uv with python and ai gemini pro right within the browser to create one off cool scripts. Pretty cool!

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#165

Post by andnand »

SparkyMcUnicorn wrote: post #156
andnand wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats your workflow? Ive been playing with Claude Code for personal use. Usually new projects for experimentation. We have Copilot licenses through work so I've been playing around with VS Code agent mode for the last week. Usually using 3.5, 3.7 Sonnet or 04-mini. This is in a large Go project. Its been abysmal at everything other than tests. I've been trying to figure out if I'm just using the tooling wrong but I f…

Switch to using Sonnet 4 (it's available in VS Code Insiders for me at least). I'm not 100% sure but a Github org admin and/or you might need to enable this model in the Github web interface. Write good base instructions for your agent[0][1] and keep them up to date. Have your agent help you write and critique it. Start tasks by planning with your agent (e.g. "do not write any code."), and have your agent propose 2-3…

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks! Im trying to give these tools a fair shot before I judge them. Ive had success with detailed prompts and letting the agent jump straight in when working on small/new projects. Ill give more planning prompts a shot.

Do you change models between planning and implementation? I've seen that recommended but it's been hard to judge if that's made a difference.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#166

Post by 6bb32646d83d »

sampo wrote: post #44
yuri91 wrote: 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…

> no new language/framework/library will ever be able to emerge? Here is a Youtube video that makes the same argument. React is / will be the last Javascript framework, because it is the dominant one right now. Even of people publish new frameworks, LLM coding assistants will not be able to assist coding using the new frameworks, so the new frameworks will not find users or popularity. And even for React, it will be…

My theory is that it will not be the case.

New frameworks can be created, but they will be different from before:

- AI-friendly syntax, AI-friendly error handling

- Before being released, we will have to spend hundred of millions of token of agents reading the framework and writing documentation and working example code with it, basically creating the dataset that other AI can reference when using the new framework.

- Create a way to have that documentation/example code easily available for AI agents (via MCP or new paradigm)

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#167

Post by NitpickLawyer »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #142
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rephrased: as good training data will diminish exponentially with the Internet being inundated by LLM regurgitations I don't think the premise is accurate in this specific case. First, if anything, training data for newer libs can only increase. Presumably code reaches github in a "at least it compiles" state. So you have lots of people fight the AIs and push code that at least compiles. You can then filter for the…

> First, if anything, training data for newer libs can only increase. How? Presumably in the "every coder is using AI assistants" future, it will be an incredible amount of friction to get people to adopt languages that AI assistants don't know anything about So how does the training data for a new language get made, if no programmers are using the language, because the AI tools that all programmers rely on aren't tr…

You can code today with new libs, you just need to tell the model what to use. Things like context7 work, or downloading docs, llms.txt or any other thing that will pop up in the future. The idea that LLMs can only generate what they were trained on is like 3 years old. They can do pretty neat things with stuff in context today.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#168

Post by Leynos »

vultour wrote: post #68
petesergeant wrote: post #11

Randomly, my advice: don't sleep on this. Three or four weeks ago I was posting how LLMs were useful for one-off questions but I wouldn't trust them on my codebase. Then I spent my week's holiday messing around on them for some personal projects. I am now a fairly committed Roo user. There are lots of problems, but there is incredible value here. Try it and see if you're still a hold-out.

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…

Did you use search grounding? O3 or o4-mini-high with search grounding (which will usually come on by default with questions like this) are usually the best option.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#169

Post by Leynos »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #142
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rephrased: as good training data will diminish exponentially with the Internet being inundated by LLM regurgitations I don't think the premise is accurate in this specific case. First, if anything, training data for newer libs can only increase. Presumably code reaches github in a "at least it compiles" state. So you have lots of people fight the AIs and push code that at least compiles. You can then filter for the…

> First, if anything, training data for newer libs can only increase. How? Presumably in the "every coder is using AI assistants" future, it will be an incredible amount of friction to get people to adopt languages that AI assistants don't know anything about So how does the training data for a new language get made, if no programmers are using the language, because the AI tools that all programmers rely on aren't tr…

Synthetic training data presumably.

Re: Agentic Coding Recommendations

#170

Post by bluefirebrand »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #167
bluefirebrand wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, if anything, training data for newer libs can only increase. How? Presumably in the "every coder is using AI assistants" future, it will be an incredible amount of friction to get people to adopt languages that AI assistants don't know anything about So how does the training data for a new language get made, if no programmers are using the language, because the AI tools that all programmers rely on aren't tr…

You can code today with new libs, you just need to tell the model what to use. Things like context7 work, or downloading docs, llms.txt or any other thing that will pop up in the future. The idea that LLMs can only generate what they were trained on is like 3 years old. They can do pretty neat things with stuff in context today.

The context would have to be massive in order to ingest an entire new programming language and associated design patterns, best practices and such wouldn't it?

I'm not an expert here by any means but I'm not seeing how this makes much sense versus just using languages that the LLM is already trained on

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