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Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#191

Post by bel8 »

colinmarc wrote: post #66

My absolute favorite modality is one I don't use all that much at the moment: Zed's edit completion. If you're unfamiliar, it's like tab-completion, but it has a context that includes the edits you've made in the last few seconds, and it can predict around the cursor. The model isn't advanced enough to understand complex tasks, but it has more the feel of the "crafting gun" in Subnautica or other survival crafting ga…

That's what VSCode next edit does too. It gathers context from the surroundings and recent actions to suggest blocks of code.

It often feels magical. But I find agentic plan->review->implement->review workflow to be a net positive in cohesion, documentation and throughput, relatively speaking.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#192

Post by chickensong »

doubled112 wrote: post #83
Scroll_Swe wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've felt it too to the extent that I went down a whole new rabbit hole of what it means to be in flow state. Let me know if anybody here wants to know more, happy to post some links. I'm not a programmer, but I very much enter a flow state working on tickets, or playing a video game on higher difficulties when everything "clicks"

I miss feeling like I was "in the zone", but I haven't been able to achieve it in years. Between having kids and a work situation a few years back, it is like my brain expects to be interrupted at any moment, so won't get there.

Ride a bike.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#193

Post by chickensong »

cuttothechase wrote: post #80
danmaz74 wrote: post #46

Yes, like many others I've been experimenting a lot. What I've got so far is a harness-of-harnesses - ie, a harness which sits on top of Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode. I still use Claude Code or Codex directly for the initial planning of features, to investigate issues, and for small fixes, but whenever there's something even just a bit complex to do, I use my second-level harness. Summarizing it a lot, what it does…

what is of really good use is a super factory. The super factory drives the factory which builds the harness of harnesses.

the factory must grow

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#194

Post by kank0de »

chickensong wrote: post #193
cuttothechase wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is of really good use is a super factory. The super factory drives the factory which builds the harness of harnesses.

the factory must grow

is this a mindustry reference haha

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#195

Post by pcthrowaway »

anthonyfrisby wrote: post #88

I had this exact problem, tried opening multiple agents in different terminals but that just frays your flow state even more. There is one great workaround I’ve found. Walk coding. Walkoding, if you like. Use a harness, create a harness if you like, then load it up in telegram and off you go. I’ve been on solo hiking trips and shipped numerous features. It means you can stay concentrated on your task, while not sitti…

Are you pausing your hike to review code, check tests, and so on? Or do you just keep prompting blind until you get done with the hike and then batch review all the work?

Sorry if this is a dumb question, I haven't tried any harness-based development yet so perhaps I'm imagining a deprecated workflow in the first place

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#196

Post by hashmap »

vitally3643 wrote: post #116

I, like many nerds of the same stripe, have a dragon's hoard of every PC component I've owned in the last 20 years. I've attached as much of it to my homelab as is practical, but there's still a pile of GPUs from the last decade plus. So I decided to load up everything with more then 3GB of VRAM into various machines on the network. Anything that could conceivably run an LLM of any utility. I've been experimenting wi…

> every PC component I've owned in the last 20 years. I've attached as much of it to my homelab as is practical

this sounds like a disease. one of the early signs for me was developing a particular interest in the breaker box.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#198

Post by JKCalhoun »

tombot wrote: post #73

"I haven't been able to enter flow state like I can when I hand write code." new flow state is having 10 terminal tabs in diff worktrees and trying to remember what each bit is

Here's hoping someone starts to pull these things together into an app or Web frontend so the rest of us can configure these setups more easily.

(I was wondering yesterday, for example, if LMStudio might roll in speech-to-text capability without everyone instead having to jury-rig some custom install/config.)

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#199

Post by telesilla »

avilay wrote: post #13

Not being able to enter flow state is a very interesting observation. I've felt it too to the extent that I went down a whole new rabbit hole of what it means to be in flow state. Let me know if anybody here wants to know more, happy to post some links. To answer your question - I discuss the approach with Claude Code (e.g., should I implement my own ACT model in JAX or PyTorch, Python or Rust or Julia, etc.). Then w…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi is considered the originator of the flow concept: "a highly focused mental state conducive to creativity", it's applied to other fields such as music. Definitely worth going down the rabbit hole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002839322...

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone experimenting with different ways of using LLMs for coding?

#200

Post by amdivia »

The following paragraph is extremely emotional.

I think the whole industry is heading in the wrong direction. And it really frustrates me that most LLM coding agents are based on excessive delegation (or at least promoting it), which for me, is what causes the difficulty in entering the flow state. (I think the slow generation speed of SOTA frontier model labs also contributes to it, 30 seconds to generate something simple is a lot of time, but that's a different discussion)

We must kill excessive delegation. Our LLM coding tools should be built incapable of performing it.

Imagine if you have a coding agent where if you tell it "create a simple Todo app" it will fail telling you "simple Todo app is undefined", requiring to provide a more comprehensive descriptive prompt of what you want, then, this longer prompt becomes where your flow state functions, you are describing your edits and code in a more fluid way but still in text, and your focus becomes on this description/specification that you'll feed to the LLM.

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