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How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

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Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

#161

Post by [deleted] »

klipt wrote: post #140
jcdavis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a wild time to be in software development. Nobody(1) actually knows what causes LLMs to do certain things, we just pray the prompt moves the probabilities the right way enough such that it mostly does what we want. This used to be a field that prided itself on deterministic behavior and reproducibility. Now? We have AGENTS.md files that look like a parent talking to a child with all the bold all-caps, double emph…

Sufficiently advanced technology has become like magic: you have to prompt the electronic genie with the right words or it will twist your wishes.

[deleted]

Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

#163

Post by tokioyoyo »

scuff3d wrote: post #146
fragmede wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to run your own tests and see if the magic phrases do or do not influence the output. Have it make a Todo webapp with and without those phrases and see what happens!

That's not how it works. It's not on everyone else to prove claims false, it's on you (or the people who argue any of this had a measurable impact) to prove it actually works. I've seen a bunch of articles like this, and more comments. Nobody I've ever seen has produced any kind of measurable metrics of quality based on one approach vs another. It's all just vibes. Without something quantifiable it's not much better…

Do you actively use LLMs to do semi-complex coding work? Because if not, it will sound mumbo-jumbo to you. Everyone else can nod along and read on, as they’ve experienced all of it first hand.

Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

#164

Post by psvv »

jamesmcq wrote: post #9

This all looks fine for someone who can't code, but for anyone with even a moderate amount of experience as a developer all this planning and checking and prompting and orchestrating is far more work than just writing the code yourself. There's no winner for "least amount of code written regardless of productivity outcomes.", except for maybe Anthropic's bank account.

I'd find it deeply funny if the optimal vibe coding workflow continues to evolve to include more and more human oversight, and less and less agent autonomy, to the point where eventually someone makes a final breakthrough that they can save time by bypassing the LLM entirely and writing the code themselves. (Finally coming full circle.)

Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

#167

Post by computerex »

haolez wrote: post #12

> Notice the language: “deeply”, “in great details”, “intricacies”, “go through everything”. This isn’t fluff. Without these words, Claude will skim. It’ll read a file, see what a function does at the signature level, and move on. You need to signal that surface-level reading is not acceptable. This makes no sense to my intuition of how an LLM works. It's not that I don't believe this works, but my mental model doesn…

It is as the author said, it'll skim the content unless otherwise prompted to do so. It can read partial file fragments; it can emit commands to search for patterns in the files. As opposed to carefully reading each file and reasoning through the implementation. By asking it to go through in detail you are telling it to not take shortcuts and actually read the actual code in full.

Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

#168

Post by wrs »

haolez wrote: post #12

> Notice the language: “deeply”, “in great details”, “intricacies”, “go through everything”. This isn’t fluff. Without these words, Claude will skim. It’ll read a file, see what a function does at the signature level, and move on. You need to signal that surface-level reading is not acceptable. This makes no sense to my intuition of how an LLM works. It's not that I don't believe this works, but my mental model doesn…

The original “chain of thought” breakthrough was literally to insert words like “Wait” and “Let’s think step by step”.

Re: How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

#169

Post by argee »

haolez wrote: post #95
Betelbuddy wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its very logical and pretty obvious when you do code generation. If you ask the same model, to generate code by starting with: - You are a Python Developer... or - You are a Professional Python Developer... or - You are one of the World most renowned Python Experts, with several books written on the subject, and 15 years of experience in creating highly reliable production quality code... You will notice a clear impr…

That's different. You are pulling the model, semantically, closer to the problem domain you want it to attack. That's very different from "think deeper". I'm just curious about this case in specific :)

I don't know about some of those "incantations", but it's pretty clear that an LLM can respond to "generate twenty sentences" vs. "generate one word". That means you can indeed coax it into more verbosity ("in great detail"), and that can help align the output by having more relevant context (inserting irrelevant context or something entirely improbable into LLM output and forcing it to continue from there makes it clear how detrimental that can be).

Of course, that doesn't mean it'll definitely be better, but if you're making an LLM chain it seems prudent to preserve whatever info you can at each step.

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