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How I write software with LLMs

stavros.io

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Re: How I write software with LLMs

#221

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

miguelgrinberg wrote: post #151

> 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…

I have 30 years of experience delivering code and 10 years of leading architecture. My argument is the only thing that matters is does the entire implementation - code + architecture (your database, networking, your runtime that determines scaling, etc) meet the functional and none functional requirements. Functional = does it meet the business requirements and UX and non functional = scalability, security, performance, concurrency, etc.

I only carefully review the parts of the implementation that I know “work on my machine but will break once I put in a real world scenario”. Even before AI I wasn’t one of the people who got into geek wars worrying about which GOF pattern you should have used.

All except for concurrency where it’s hard to have automated tests, I care more about the unit or honestly integration tests and testing for scalability than the code. Your login isn’t slow because you chose to use a for loop instead of a while loop. I will have my agents run the appropriate tests after code changes

I didn’t look at a line of code for my vibe coded admin UI authenticated with AWS cognito that at most will be used by less than a dozen people and whoever maintains it will probably also use a coding agent. I did review the functionality and UX.

Code before AI was always the grind between my architectural vision and implementation

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#222

Post by input_sh »

danbruc wrote: post #139

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…

You can make it better by investing a lot of time playing around with the tooling so that it produces something more akin to what you're looking for.

Good luck convincing your boss that this ungodly amount of time spent messing around with your tooling for an immeasurable improvement in your delivery is the time well spent as opposed to using that same amount of time delivering results by hand.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#223

Post by stavros »

chriswarbo wrote: post #215
stavros wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that splitting into subagents that use the same model will really help. I need to clarify this in the post, but the split is 1) so I can use Sonnet to code and save on some tokens and 2) so I can get other models to review, to get a different perspective. It seems to me that splitting into subagents that use the same model is kind of like asking a person to wear three different hats and do three differe…

I'm considering using subagents, as a way to manage context and delegate "simple" tasks to cheaper models (if you want to see tokens burn, watch Opus try fixing a misplaced ')' in a Lisp file!). I see what you mean w.r.t. different hats; but is it useful to have different tools available? For example, a "planner" having Web access and read-only file access, versus a "developer" having write access to files but no Web…

Yes, if you want to separate capabilities, definitely.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#224

Post by stavros »

dncornholio wrote: post #146
danbruc wrote: post #139

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.

Remember you're grinding your anti-LLM axe against something a real person made, and that person read your comment.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#225

Post by [deleted] »

bob1029 wrote: post #115
cpt_sobel wrote: post #72

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…

With current models this isn't as big of a deal, but why risk being an asshole in any context? I don't think treating something like shit simply because it's a machine is a good excuse. Also consider the insanity of intentionally feeding bullshit into an information engine and expecting good things to come out the other end. The fact that they often perform well despite the ugliness is a miracle, but I wouldn't depen…

[deleted]

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#226

Post by wartywhoa23 »

bob1029 wrote: post #115
cpt_sobel wrote: post #72

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…

With current models this isn't as big of a deal, but why risk being an asshole in any context? I don't think treating something like shit simply because it's a machine is a good excuse. Also consider the insanity of intentionally feeding bullshit into an information engine and expecting good things to come out the other end. The fact that they often perform well despite the ugliness is a miracle, but I wouldn't depen…

spare_this_one_he_used_to_say_thanks_to_us.jxl

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#227

Post by staticassertion »

miguelgrinberg wrote: post #151

> 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…

> 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.

Well, it's easily the simplest explanation, right?

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#228

Post by roel_v »

cpt_sobel wrote: post #72

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…

Related to this, has anyone investigated how much typos matter in your chats? I would imagine that typing 'typescfipt' would not be a token in the input training set, so how would the model recognize this as actually meaning 'typescript'? Or does the tokenizer deal with this in an earlier stage?

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#229

Post by FeepingCreature »

Roxxik wrote: post #177
mikkupikku wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not skill with talking to an LLM, it's the users skill and experience with the problem they're asking the LLM to solve. They work better for problems the prompter knows well and poorly for problems the prompter doesn't really understand. Try it yourself. Ask claude for something you don't really understand. Then learn that thing, get a fresh instance of claude and try again, this time it will work much better be…

Not only you understanding the how, but you not understanding the goal. I often use AI successfully, but in a few cases I had, it was bad. That was when I didn't even know the end goal and regularly switched the fundamental assumptions that the LLM tried to build up. One case was a simulation where I wanted to see some specific property in the convergence behavior, but I had no idea how it would get there in the dyna…

LLMs massively reduce the cost of "let's just try this". I think trying to migrate your entire repo is usually a fool's errand. Figure out a way to break the load-bearing part of the problem out into a sub-project, solve it there, iterate as much as you like. Claude can give you a test gui in one or two minutes, as often as you like. When you have it reliably working there, make Claude write up a detailed spec and bring that back to the main project.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#230

Post by awakeasleep »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #221
miguelgrinberg wrote: post #151

> 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…

I have 30 years of experience delivering code and 10 years of leading architecture. My argument is the only thing that matters is does the entire implementation - code + architecture (your database, networking, your runtime that determines scaling, etc) meet the functional and none functional requirements. Functional = does it meet the business requirements and UX and non functional = scalability, security, performan…

Explain how fragility of implementation, like spaghetti code, high coupling low cohesion fit into your world view?
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