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How I write software with LLMs

stavros.io

191–200 of 544 posts

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point. I could try with a harder problem. This still does not explain why Claude Code felt the need to use Opus, and why Opus felt the need to burn 12$ or such an easy task. I mean, it's 40 times the cost.

I'm a bit confused actually, you said you used Claude Code for both examples? Was that a typo, or was it (1) Claude Code instructed to use a hierarchy of agents and (2) Claude Code allowed to do whatever it wants?

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Re: How I write software with LLMs

#194

> One thing I’ve noticed is that different people get wildly different results with LLMs, so I suspect there’s some element of how you’re talking to them that affects the results. It's always easier to blame the prompt and convince yourself that you have some sort of talent in how you talk to LLMs that other's don't. In my experience the differences are mostly in how the code produced by the LLM is reviewed. Develope…

That seems to make sense. Any suggestions to improve this skill of reviewing code? I think especially a number of us more junior programmers lack in this regard, and don't see a clear way of improving this skill beyond just using LLMs more and learning with time?

You improve this skill by not using LLMs more and getting more experienced as a programmer yourself. Spotting problems during review comes from experience, from having learned the lessons, knowing the codebase and libraries used etc.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#196
On using different models: GitHub copilot has an API that gives you access to many different models from many different providers. They are very transparent about how they use your data[1]; in some cases it’s safer to use a model through them than through the original provider.

You can point Claude at the copilot models with some hackery[2] and opencode supports copilot models out of the box.

Finally, copilot is quite generous with the amount of usage you get from a Github pro plan (goes really far with Sonnet 4.6 which feels pretty close to Opus 4.5), and they’re generous with their free pro licenses for open source etc.

Despite having stuck to autocomplete as their main feature for too long, this aspect of their service is outstanding.

[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/ai-models/model...

[2]: https://github.com/ericc-ch/copilot-api

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#197

I randomly clicked and scrolled through the source code of Stavrobot - The largest thing I’ve built lately is an alternative to OpenClaw that focuses on security. [1] and that is not great code. I have not used any AI to write code yet but considered trying it out - is this the kind of code I should expect? Or maybe the other way around, has someone an example of some non-trivial code - in size and complexity - writt…

I also managed to find a 1000 line .cpp file in one of the projects. The article's content doesn't match his apps quality. They don't bring any value. His clock looks completely AI generated.

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Re: How I write software with LLMs

#198
When I use Claude code to work on a hobby project it feels like doom scrolling…

I can’t get my head around if the hobby is the making or the having, but fair to say I’ve felt quite dissatisfied at the end of my hobby sessions lately so leaning towards the former.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasoning is by being polite the LLM is more likely to stay on a professional path: at its core a LLM try to make your prompt coherent with its training set, and a polite prompt + its answer will score higher (gives better result) than a prompt that is out of place with the answer. I understand to some people it could feel like anthropomorphising and could turn them off but to me it's purely about engineering. Ed…

> If the result of your prompt + its answer it's more likely to score higher i.e. gives better result that a prompt that feels out of place with the answer Sure seems like this could be the case with the structure of the prompt, but what about capitalizing the first letter of sentence, or adding commas, tag questions etc? They seem like semantics that will not play any role at the end

Writing is what gives my thinking structure. Sloppy writing feels to me like sloppy thinking. My fingers capitalize the first letter of words, proper nouns and adjectives, and add punctuation without me consciously asking them to do so.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#200

In the plethora of all these articles that explain the process of building projects with LLMs, one thing I never understood it why the authors seem to write the prompts as if talking to a human that cares how good their grammar or syntax is, e.g.: > I'd like to add email support to this bot. Let's think through how we would do this. and I'm not not even talking about the usage of "please" or "thanks" (which this part…

I write "properly" (and I do say "please" and "thank you"), just because I like exercising that muscle. The LLM doesn't care, but I do.
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