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How I write software with LLMs

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Re: How I write software with LLMs

#231

Post by baxtr »

marviio wrote: post #188
baxtr wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I try to debunk your argument with a food example. I am not sure I succeeded though. Judge for yourself: It's always easier to blame the ingredients and convince yourself that you have some sort of talent in how you cook that others don't. In my experience the differences are mostly in how the dishes produced in the kitchen are tasted. Chefs who have experience tasting dishes critically are more likely to f…

In your example the one making the food is you. You would have to introduce a cooking robot for the analogy to match agentic coding.

Actually I would say it should be a cooking machine like. I am not too familiar with these machines however.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#232

Post by staticassertion »

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…

There is evidence of that, but more importantly, it wouldn't occur to me to write "wanna add email support". That's not my natural voice.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#233

Post by fooster »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #113
lbreakjai wrote: post #106

It's interesting to see some patterns starting to emerge. Over time, I ended up with a similar workflow. Instead of using plan files within the repository, I'm using notion as the memory and source of truth. My "thinker" agent will ask questions, explore, and refine. It will write a feature page in notion, and split the implementation into tasks in a kanban board, for an "executor" to pick up, implement, and pass to…

No criticism or anything, but it really does feel / sound like you (and others who embraced LLMs and agentic coding) aspire to be more of a product manager than a coder. Thing is, a "real" PM comes with a lot more requirements and there's less demand for them - more requirements in that you need to be a people person and willing to spend at least half your time in meetings, and less demand because one PM will organiz…

“one PM will organize the work for half a dozen developer”

That isn’t the job of a PM.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#235

Post by staticassertion »

borski wrote: post #12
silisili wrote: post #10

I'm not sure the notion I keep seeing of "it's ok, we still architect, it just writes the code"(paraphrased) sits well with me. I've not tested it with architecting a full system, but assuming it isn't good at it today... it's only a matter of time. Then what is our use?

LLMs can build anything. The real question is what is worth building, and how it’s delivered. That is what is still human. LLMs, by nature of not being human, cannot understand humans as well as other humans can. (See every attempt at using an LLM as a therapist) In short: LLMs will eventually be able to architect software. But it’s still just a tool

> LLMs can build anything.

This is only possibly true if one of two things are true:

1. All new software can be made up of of preexisting patterns of software that can be composed. ie: There is no such thing as "novel" software, it's all just composition of existing software.

2. LLMs are capable of emergent intelligence, allowing them to express patterns that they were not trained on.

I am extremely skeptical that either of these is true.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#236

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

awakeasleep wrote: post #230
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Also developer UX, common antipatterns, etc

This “the only thing that matters about code is whether it meets requirements” is such a tired take and I can’t imagine anyone seriously spouting it has has had to maintain real software.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#237

Post by petcat »

awakeasleep wrote: post #230
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As human developers, I think we're struggling with "letting go" of the code. The code we write (or agents write) is really just an intermediate representation (IR) of the solution.

For instance, GCC will inline functions, unroll loops, and myriad other optimizations that we don't care about (and actually want!). But when we review the ASM that GCC generates we are not concerned with the "spaghetti" and the "high coupling" and "low cohesion". We care that it works, and is correct for what it is supposed to do.

Source code in a higher-level language is not really different anymore. Agents write the code, maybe we guide them on patterns and correct them when they are obviously wrong, but the code is just the work-item artifact that comes out of extensive specification, discussion, proposal review, and more review of the reviews.

A well-guided, iterative process and problem/solution description should be able to generate an equivalent implementation whether a human is writing the code or an agent.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#238

Post by staticassertion »

wiseowise wrote: post #137
borski wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said great engineers didn’t write code. But writing the code was never the point. The point has always been delivering the product to the customer, in any industry. Code is rarely the deliverable. That’s my point.

> But writing the code was never the point. Is that why most prestigious jobs grilled you like a devil on algos/system design? > The point has always been delivering the product to the customer, in any industry. Code is rarely the deliverable. That’s just nonsense. It’s like saying “delivering product was always the most important thing, not drinking water”.

It's well understood that programming interviews are a pretty shitty tool. They're a proxy for understanding if you have basic skills required to understand a computer. Notably, most companies don't rely on these alone, they have behavioral questions, architecture questions, etc. Have you ever done an interview at these companies you're talking about? They're 8 hours lol maybe 1 is spent programming.

But it's just very obvious to any software engineer worth anything that code is just one part of the job, and it's usually somewhere in the middle of a process. Understanding customer requirements, making technical decisions, maintaining the codebase, reviewing code changes/ providing feedback, responding on incidents, deciding what work to do or not to do, deciding when a constraint has to be broken, etc. There are a billion things that aren't "typing code" that an engineer does every day. To deny this is absurd to anyone who lives every day doing those things.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#239

Post by zackify »

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…

This definitely is the case. I was talking to someone complaining about how llms don't work good.

They said it couldn't fix an issue it made.

I asked if they gave it any way to validate what it did.

They did not, some people really are saying "fix this" instead of saying "x fn is doing y when someone makes a request to it. Please attempt to fix x and validate it by accessing the endpoint after and writing tests"

Its shocking some people don't give it any real instruction or way to check itself.

In addition I get great results doing voice to text with very specific workflows. Asking it to add a new feature where I describe what functions I want changed then review as I go vs wait for the end.

Re: How I write software with LLMs

#240

Post by themantri »

roel_v wrote: post #228
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?

I have tried prompting with a bunch of typos in Claude Code with Sonnet and found it to be fairly tolerant.

It has always done what I meant or asked me a clarifying question (because of my CLAUDE.md instruction).

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