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My LLM codegen workflow

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Re: My LLM codegen workflow

#21

Post by jacooper »

I find making the LLMs think and plan the project a bit worrying, I understand this helps with procrastination but when these systems eventually get better and more integrated, the most likely thing to happen to software devs is them moving away from purely coding to more of a solution architect role (aka Planning stuff), not taking into account the negative impact of giving up critical thinking to LLMs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43057907

Other than that a great article! Very insightful.

Re: My LLM codegen workflow

#22

Post by maelito »

Given a 3 648 318 tokens repository (number from Repomix), I'm not sure what would be the cost of using a leading LLM to analyse it and ask improvements.

Isn't the input token number way more limited than that ?

This is part is unclear to me in the "non-Greenfield" part of the article.

Iterating with aider on very limited scopes is easy, I've used it often. But what about understanding a whole repository and act on it ? Following imports to understand a Typescript codebase as a whole ?

Re: My LLM codegen workflow

#23

Post by becquerel »

Isamu wrote: post #16

I’m curious, is adding “do not hallucinate” to prompts effective in preventing hallucinations? The author does this.

I don't know about this specific technique, but I have found it useful to add a line like 'it's OK if you don't know or this isn't possible' at the end of queries. Otherwise LLMs have a tendency to tilt at whatever windmill you give them. Managing tone and expectations with them is a subtle but important art.

Re: My LLM codegen workflow

#24

Post by danphilibin »

jrexilius wrote: post #12

The first part of this, where you told it to ask YOU questions, rather than laboriously building prompts and context yourself was the magic ticket for me. And I doubt I would have stumbled on that sorta inverse logic on my own. Really great write up!

This is the key to a lot of my workflows as well. I'll usually tack some form of "ask me up to 5 questions to improve your understanding of what I'm trying to do here" onto the end of my initial messages. Over time I've noticed patterns in information I tend to leave out which has helped me improve my initial prompts, plus it often gets me thinking about aspects I hadn't considered yet.

Re: My LLM codegen workflow

#25

Post by rollinDyno »

Something I quickly learned while retooling this past week is that it’s preferable not to add opinionated frameworks to the project as they increase the size of the context the model should be aware of. This context will also not likely be available in the training data.

For example, rather than using Plasmo for its browser extension boilerplate and packaging utilities, I’ve chosen to ask the LLM to setup all of that for me as it won’t have any blindspots when tasked with debugging.

Re: My LLM codegen workflow

#26

Post by kridsdale3 »

maelito wrote: post #22

Given a 3 648 318 tokens repository (number from Repomix), I'm not sure what would be the cost of using a leading LLM to analyse it and ask improvements. Isn't the input token number way more limited than that ? This is part is unclear to me in the "non-Greenfield" part of the article. Iterating with aider on very limited scopes is easy, I've used it often. But what about understanding a whole repository and act on i…

Well, do you as a human have the whole codebase loaded in to your memory with the ability to mentally reason with it? No, you work on a small scope at a time.

Re: My LLM codegen workflow

#27

Post by staindk »

bambax wrote: post #20

This is all fine for a solo dev, but how does this work with a team / squad, working on the same code base? Having 7 different instances of an LLM analyzing the same code base and making suggestions would not just be economically wasteful, it would also be unpractical or even dangerous? Outside of RAG, which is a different thing, are there products that somehow "centralize" the context for a team, where all questions…

I've only recently switched to Cursor so am not clued up about everything, but they mention that the embedded indexing they do on your code is shared with others (others who have access to that repository? Unsure).

It did seem to take a while to index, even though my colleagues had been using Cursor for a while, so I'm likely misunderstanding something.

Re: My LLM codegen workflow

#28

Post by layer8 »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #26
maelito wrote: post #22

Given a 3 648 318 tokens repository (number from Repomix), I'm not sure what would be the cost of using a leading LLM to analyse it and ask improvements. Isn't the input token number way more limited than that ? This is part is unclear to me in the "non-Greenfield" part of the article. Iterating with aider on very limited scopes is easy, I've used it often. But what about understanding a whole repository and act on i…

Well, do you as a human have the whole codebase loaded in to your memory with the ability to mentally reason with it? No, you work on a small scope at a time.

You may work in a limited scope at a time, but you are aware how it fits into the larger scope, and more often than not you actually have to connect things across different scopes.
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